From Technology Adoption to User Adoption: How Technology Has Changed Change Management

  Change Management   Information Technology   Strategy  

We accept technology into our lives without question. We know something new will emerge soon and we know that society expects us to adopt and adapt when the next new thing shows up. We accept it. Often we welcome it. Thanks to technology, we are saturated with change. You’re working on a project that will introduce more change. In fact, your measure of success is user adoption, and if your users don’t accept your change then your project will fail. Technology has shifted our change thresholds for better or worse. As project managers we have to deal with that. We will journey down a slightly different path of change management and user adoption. We’ll explore the impact of technology in shifting change thresholds. While a change management plan focuses on managing changes in such a way as to achieve the best outcome, you’ll learn how to create an adaptability plan, which focuses on the people being impacted by the changes, including individual and group needs required for success.

Beth Spriggs, PMP, is the vice president of technology at Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), a major nonpartisan organization. For more than 15 years, she’s solved unsolvable problems, tamed unruly projects, and pulled off the impossible for organizations by deploying technologies that work for customers while positioning clients for what’s coming next. Her extensive portfolio consists of everything from bite-sized undertakings to years-long overhauls that impact every aspect of the organization, but her focus has always been technology project management. Beth got her foundation in the tech world through database administration. Since then she has managed everything from internal servers, budgets and vendors to implementing a vast range of software; through which she’s developed knowledge of a wide breadth of technology. At LEE, Beth turned around the integrity of a database that had been all but abandoned. She listened with purpose, asked the right questions, and built a system that meets users’ wants and needs, ultimately salvaging user adoption of the organization’s core system. She has spoken at the ASAE Technology Conference (2007), and the Protech User Group Annual Meeting (2012, 2013). In 2013, she accepted the Protech WOW! Award for Overall Experience on behalf of her team at the National Association of Independent Schools. 

We accept technology into our lives without question. We know something new will emerge soon and we know that society expects us to adopt and adapt when the next new thing shows up. We accept it. Often we welcome it. Thanks to technology, we are saturated with change. You’re working on a project that will introduce more change. In fact, your measure of success is user adoption, and if your users don’t accept your change then your project will fail. Technology has shifted our change thresholds for better or worse. As project managers we have to deal with that. We will journey down a slightly different path of change management and user adoption. We’ll explore the impact of technology in shifting change thresholds. While a change management plan focuses on managing changes in such a way as to achieve the best outcome, you’ll learn how to create an adaptability plan, which focuses on the people being impacted by the changes, including individual and group needs required for success.