Tyréns is one of Sweden’s leading community development consultancies. Together with their customers and partners, they create sustainable solutions in the fields of urban development and infrastructure. Owned by a private foundation, Tyréns is committed to research and development.
So many companies fail when “rolling out” a new solution, an intranet or collaboration tools for example. Often that’s because they forget to “onboard” the users who only get presented with a set of new tools but no instructions on how to use them to work in a new and efficient way.
This was something Tyréns wanted to avoid.
The findings from the user research were packaged and presented to group IT, the project and the IT managers in the different organizations as a basis for further planning.
I collected user insights and lessons learned from the onboarded Swedish organization and the expectations of the upcoming roll out and onboarding of the other organizations in Denmark, UK, Lithuania and Estonia.
I had one calendar month to collect the insights so I started by understanding the stakeholders expectations of the result and got names of people to interview.
I also created a research plan to be able to be on track with what we wanted to achieve, what focus areas to collect insights about and how to go through with the interviews. Almost all the interviews I booked were held online due to not being able to travel and due to Covid-19.
When talking to the project members in Sweden I learned that they had put a lot of effort in producing training material with the end users needs in mind.
They had also created a network platform to enable continuous learning and collaboration after the project ended.
The biggest concern, when talking to the other organizations, was how to get everyone onboard with new tools and ways of working. It’s always easier to do as you’ve always done.
Voice from the business
The planned technical roll out would provide the tools but an onboardning to instruct the users was needed to be able to achieve value of the new way of working.
The image was my way of explaining the difference between roll out and onboarding.
I conducted the interviews and summarized the insights in a presentation.
The focus was to communicate the gaps between what the upcoming roll out project was going to deliver and what the users were expecting. It was also important to point out and communicate the lessons learned in the onboarding project in Sweden.
After delivering the presentation to my requestor I also presented it to the steering committee and other stakeholders.
The result of my assignment was later used as input to transforming the scope of the upcoming technical roll out to also include the users perspective and to reuse a lot of the knowledge from the onboarding in Sweden.
The main challenge in this project was to conduct the interviews online. A lot of body language got lost and at times there was some technical challenges with poor internet connection.
I learned that there is a huge difference between the term roll out and onboarding. It made me really glad to see that Tyréns also saw this and took action based on that insight.
The planned technical roll out and onboarding of end users will go on during the winter of 2020.