Ding! Ding! Round 2!

Just about one year ago, I was helping launch Chatter at my previous company. Fast forward to this week, and I’m once again helping to roll out Chatter. So while I thought my first post about Chatter was pretty good, there are definitely some more additional things we did this time around that I’d like to share.

To start, we still used a sandbox environment with our power users to get them comfortable with Chatter.  This was a cross-functional group of users from all over the organization. I note this, because an admin may focus too much on sales (where a lot of the changes in an org may come from), but not enough on other departments where the knowledge & expertise resides.

This period of testing was useful for everyone. For us, to gather thoughts and feedback on how Chatter would be perceived by our end users. For our power users, they got to be involved in decision-making and preview the new functionality. And this was not a one or two week testing period. We gave our power users almost two months of sandbox access to really get comfortable.

This extended period of time not only allowed for plenty of testing, but allowed us to do a teaser campaign to all of our end users about the up-coming launch. We had signage on the cubes of our power users, as well as an email campaign coming from various executives leading up to the go-live, which included YouTube videos & a link to register for our training session. (And speaking of the senior team, having executive buy-in was a key factor in how quickly this project moved forward & how well it was adopted.)

Another thing that the testing period gave us was content – specifically, the kinds of groups users would want to be using. So when we went live, we moved all the groups over to production & pre-populated based on input from the group creator. This helped all of our users see immediate value when they logged in on Monday morning. (Yes, we did the launch on a Sunday night to reduce impact to users. Personally, I think weekend launch is the best way to go.)

Finally, we installed the Chatter Usage Dashboards, just to get some quick metrics around usage and adoption. We saw some great numbers to share back with the organization.

Round two – TKO!