What are your adoption best practices?

[AndrewB]

With Workspace releasing new features every week, I want to kick start a thread about change management and adoption:

• What are some challenges and some strategies you use to raise awareness prepare your users?
• How are you communicating to and training users? 
• Are you measuring user happiness in any way? 

Let's help the community out by providing our best tips. 

[tech01]

I am providing Office Hours weekly.  Normally, new information is transmitted through email to the end users.  If there are any questions, the users pop into Office Hours.

[gasparick]

Segmentation of user groups is one starting place to consider! Many updates impact IT Admins and not the end-users in the organization, so it is nice to target the right audience whenever you can!

From there, sharing the benefit to the user of the change is a great way to capture and maintain attention. 😎

[candice]

Brilliant, love the tailoring of it and segmenting the user groups

[IoTeacher]

On EDU personal situation, I'm was ready to all changes come and adopt rapidly, all teacher just jump to the new interface and really like no complain.

But I never in these 10 yrs on GSuite-GWorkspace was so intrigue since an email at the end of june, for "EDU Basic" accounts will be limited to 100 Terabytes for total Domain space, my biggest H/S at that time was 40 Terabytes, and for EDU´s with 24K accounts will be a incremental with talks for GSupport.

 For now we are working to solve and talk to Staff because the user space will increment definitely, we where unlimited webspace from day one,  and now we are working on it, will impact us in a year.

[stimms]

I am also on Edu Fundementals and part of a Multi Academy Trust in the UK and I am very worried about the storage change. We were advised to migrate all of our schools separate tenancies into 1 Multi Academy Trust tenancy so we can manage all of our schools easier. It's taken us years to merge our large schools with many chromebooks. Only now we feel like we have been slapped in the face as if we kept each school in it's own tenancy we could benefit from more storage for each school. 

[marta_desouza]

We did not have and change management delegate to push Google Workspaces. We've started when it was called GSuite for Education and it was all free and unlimited. Now boundaries are starting to be set and some of what was thought to be free are now paid services. Fair enough, nothing is free forever, at least not if it is good and a bunch of people start using it. I accept we were the guinea pigs of the process.

Now it is still me trying to push most of it and I inform staff gradually and granularly of the changes on a needs must basis.

The good thing is that not many people trusted and put their files out there in droves at our end so our usage was not that elevated anyway so we are still winning.

[stimms]

Our main challenges come from Educational institutions in the UK. We have very little time (20 minutes for new staff at the start of the year) to formally train staff. Teachers and Leadership teams have such finate time and IT training often goes to the bottom of the list as the limited training slots in schools are prioritised for the teaching and safeguarding of children.

We communicate new features via all staff emails and train staff 1 to 1 when/if we/they indentify the need.

We don't measure user 'happiness' specifically but we do have ticket system that asks for feedback on resolutions and also have a fornightly survey about school which periodically includes how they feel about IT.

[candice]

Some of my thoughts from working with some enterprises and small business deployments and change management:

• A great strategy is to tap into the Early Adopter group from the deployment, and create a forum of some kind for them to be able to share and collaborate on new features. You will get success stories, some change agents continually driving innovation and further adoption 
• And in terms of running continuous Innovation Councils - ensuring that new features are always celebrated and discussed [Embed and Expand]
• Communication, communication, communication: Ensure there is communication going out to the business regarding features coming through. 
  • Send out a Google Form to assess which features they would like training on
• Chat with the Admin - and ensure your organization is set on Scheduled Release so that you can adequately prepare for when its released with comms and suggested
• Super helpful: Subscribe to the Google Workspace Updates Blog - new features will arrive in your inbox with a how too

Thanks Candice

[jodi_carroll]

Totally agree with communication, communication, communication; especially since team members are always coming and going and they also may not see the post and/or email the first time around!

[GerhardZelenka]

Our primary strategy has been to subscribe to the Google Workspace Updates Blog as suggested by @candice, so that updates are posted directly into our (Facebook) Workplace, but there have been a number of challenges to overcome (Work-arounds are posted in italics after each point

• The update comes through as plain text only, with all formatting removed, making the updates very hard to read.
  The updates are posted a couple of weeks before each change, I schedule a manual fully-formatted post for start date of the change as an additional "incoming!" prompt.
• There are number of paid-tier versions of Google Workspace for Education, and there's currently no  way to filter the feed so staff only see relevant updates.
  I post N/A notices after all features we won't have access to so that people still know that they've gone live, even if we won't have access to them. Some of the features started development before the current multi-tier system, but they're going live in higher tier so it's important for staff and groups to know they won't get access to them.
• Feedburner is about to disable email subscriptions.
  I've only just discovered this issue, so I don't have a work-around yet

[jodi_carroll]

Adoption, training and communicating Google's updates is a part of my daily work.  Here are some of the things I've been doing that has helped with adoption over the past 6 years:

• Created, encourage, educate and meet with (monthly) a team of Google Guides (worldwide volunteers)
• Created a Google Group for the Google Guides and published and encourage team members to ask "how to" questions to this group.  The team today looks different than when we first started but it is a solid group of tenured and new participants.  Each question that comes into this Google Group of volunteers is answered within 15 minutes
• Established a Google Guide Subject Matter Expert (SME) for each Google application
• Each Google Guide SME has their own resource page on our company intranet
• Each Google Guide SME manages a Chat Space for their application
• Developed resource pages on our Company intranet for Google Workspace resources (which includes the Google Workspace Learning Center, the Google Workspace YouTube channel and all of our internal resources
• Developed and maintain a bi-weekly newsletter called "Google at a Glance" that is emailed bi-weekly from our Communications Department to all team members (27,000) which includes:
  • Google enhancements that have been made to our environment over the past two weeks
  • Google Like a Pro tips 
  • Provide Google Workspace Productivity Sessions through the scheduling feature of Google Calendar where I cover the enhancements that Google has made to the product over the past 3-6 months (and show team members how these enhancements increase productivity
• Reach out to and communicate with team leaders and offer GW productivity sessions where I see and/or hear adoption is low

In regards to measuring user happiness, the leaders who have requested a GW Productivity Session does their own survey for their business unit.

I'd love to share and hear from others about what you are doing to increase adoption.