Running a Successful Enterprise 2.0 Pilot
You won’t find an an Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) expert on the planet who doesn’t recommend running a pilot before you go organization-wide with your E2.0 platform solution. And you won’t find one here.
At NewsGator, nine out of 10 of our customers start with a pilot before they deploy enterprisewide. And for two good reasons: to test the technology in their environment, and to learn valuable lessons they can apply in a broader deployment. This article offers concrete suggestions on how to run a successful pilot and maximize the results.
Having worked on dozens of large-enterprise pilots, I have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t. The typical customer pilot at NewsGator has 100-250 users and runs about 30 days. The steps I outline here are specific to a full-fledged internal Enterprise 2.0 platform solution consisting of communities, microblogging, activity streams, idea innovation, wikis, blogs, expertise discovery, document management, social bookmarking, RSS, profiles and social networking. If you’re doing just one or two pieces, you can scale back accordingly.
Here are the steps I take my pilot customers through, and they work:
1. Discuss the business drivers. Why are you evaluating E2.0 internally? What business problems are you trying to solve? Have this conversation early on with business sponsors and the project team. First, it puts everyone on the same page (I can’t tell you how often a project team doesn’t understand why it’s doing what it’s doing). Second, it drives configuration of the platform. If the focus is on collaboration, for example, communities should be prominent. Finally, it establishes success criteria and points to the right participants. If the main goal is expertise location, for example, you need to start with participants who don’t know one another.
2. Define top user scenarios and seed those areas with content. Okay, you’ve configured your platform, but at this point it’s still an empty house. You need to paint the walls, bring in
some furniture and add some bookshelves. Make sure there is value the first time a user hits your pilot site. Plan out content for landing pages, communities, expertise maps, anywhere a user might go. I always recommend a “help and feedback” community containing FAQs, best practices and ready-to-go discussion threads soliciting questions and comments.
3. Identify communities and community managers. In addition to your help and feedback community, identify at least a handful of additional communities to start when your end-users enter the pilot. What types of communities make sense for your pilot participants? Typical types of E2.0 communities include practice/expertise (e.g., clinical research), projects (e.g., planning the next annual meeting), customers (by major account or category) and employee engagement (e.g., on-boarding new hires). In which areas can you find the most interested and passionate community managers for the pilot? A community without a good community manager won’t be successful and you won’t have time to play catch-up.
4. Create a participation plan. Getting participation in your pilot can be a challenge for a number of reasons. First, a pilot is held in a sandbox environment outside the normal workflow. Second, participants believe, often correctly, that content from the pilot environment won’t get transferred to the production environment. In other words, they worry they’re wasting their time. Understanding these challenges and setting expectations is half the battle. To mitigate the challenges:
- Choose enthusiastic participants who are genuinely excited about the new technology and eager to help vet it for your organization;
- Offer incentives. I worked with one customer to create a “have a coffee on us” campaign where everyone who completed his profile by a certain date received a $5 Starbucks card. Participation spiked; and
- Recognize contribution and participation. Spotlight participants doing the things you want and light a competitive fire that prompts others to join in. For example, you can offer “top-rated content” labels on the best posts, bookmarks, documents, etc.
5. Assemble your education plan. Because Enterprise 2.0 is so intuitive, traditional classroom training is unnecessary. Nonetheless, you must prepare your community managers to succeed and your end-users to hit the ground running.
I run two types of education sessions. Community manager training covers three areas: basic technical know-how; driving adoption; and best practices around choosing and using Enterprise 2.0 tools. An end-user tour of the pilot site briefly covers a sample of the usage scenarios. Then we let users go explore.
6. Build your communication plan. Work up front to identify and schedule communications for the course of the pilot. Include:
- An intro email to community managers immediately after their training session, and to end-users right after their tour. Include a quick recap of the benefits, a link to the pilot site, a link to the help and feedback community and a reminder about any incentives; and
- Then send a weekly email with a link to the pilot site, a reminder of the incentive, a “did you know?” tip and a profile or community manager of the week. This email keeps the pilot front-and-center with participants and rewards the behaviors you’re looking for.
7. Measure and wrap up. Now it’s time to gather the metrics you identified in step 1. This will probably be a combination of quantitative data you can get from your E2.0 solution as well as qualitative data from a survey. I recommend open-ended questions that generate anecdotes to complete the picture for senior executives evaluating the pilot.
By taking these steps you dramatically increase the chances of a successful pilot. As a result you end up with a more highly optimized technical environment and a more meaningful experience to improve your Enterprise 2.0 results for decades to come.
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