Video Transcript

Hello everyone! My name is Hobbs from Valorem Reply and this is This Not That, a blog where we talk about BI best practices and compare and contrast mistakes with what we suggest instead. Today we're going to be talking about driving adoption in your organization and making sure you don't say a project is done until people are truly using it.

Welcome back everyone. My name is Hobbs and I want to talk some about the importance of getting all the way to the end of what I consider a BI project to encompass. Gartner put out a report recently where they talked about big data projects, and business intelligence projects, data projects in general, and they talked about the failure rate. I believe they said that there was about a 60% failure rate in these projects. One of the analysts came out later on Twitter and said ‘honestly, I think we're a little conservative with that, my guess would be closer to 80% of these projects.’ At the end of the day, when all is said and done, they’re just coming out as failures. When they asked him why, as they dig into that question, what caused the data project not to work out, it almost always came back to people. It came back to people felt like they didn't understand how to use the new tools, they didn't understand the need for the new tools, they didn't understand what they were supposed to do, they liked the old process better. There was this disconnect between what the technology was capable of and what people needed.

So, what I'm proposing to you today is, do not focus on the completion of the data portion of your project, that's not the end. The end is adoption. You're not done as a business intelligence developer, as a manager, anyone working with data, you are not done until the average person is just using what you made. When you get there, when those business users, they just have this as a part of their life, they understand how to use it, it doesn't break anymore, they don't have a lot of data integrity questions, they've been trained about what they need to accomplish and how to do so. Then, and only then, do we start saying OK this is done. Let's just move into sort of stand in the background and maintain things mode. That people element, making sure that all of the people in your company who need to know how to do this can, and know how, and have the training they need, and the support they need, is an often-neglected portion of the process. And we're finding more and more, if Gardner is correct, that that neglect causes these projects to not work out in the long run.

If you're interested in change management, that's part of this process. That's something we do here at my company. We've got a department, a team of people dedicated to managing change within organizations on the projects that we work with, right? But even just as an individual in your company, if you want to help manage that change, there is a great repo of information on GitHub called, - and in my case, I work with the [Microsoft] Power Platform - called the Power Platform Adoption Framework. Microsoft has also put some classes out about this where you can go in, and you can watch and listen to some of the people who have really done this, not just a few dozen times but a few hundred times. Talk about what really makes the difference, how you get people over the line into really adopting and the change that comes with that. So, take some time. Wherever you're at, whether you're a developer or anything else, take some time to understand change management, recognize the importance of the people element of your processes and your projects, and then prioritize that. Don't call a project complete until it's truly been adopted.

Thank you for joining me here today. This is a topic that is important to me personally, I like the people part of my job. I think it's the most important part. So, I'm a little biased, but I think the data bears me out, this matters. If you're interested in partnering with Valorem, if you'd like us to come in and take a look at the way you're managing change or would like to bring in our team with the change management specialists, we would love to partner with you and help you out. And be a part of your company's story. In the meantime, check out our website, look at the other blog posts that are out there, find me on LinkedIn, and I will see you in the next video.