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Editor's Note: The following is excepted from the new White Paper, How More Happens: Insights from Innovation Center Members on Expanding Your Deployment. Here, we explore three ways successful clients have helped new users make the transition from paper to web-based reports. Get the full paper. The move from printed to online reports can be a major hurdle, particularly if you’re making your first expansions past your initial deployment.
Our members have found two diametrically opposite approaches to solving this problem. For some, the answer lies in extensive, hands-on training that walks new users through the solution click-by-click. “We did a lot of one-one-one training,” says one member. “It was very important to sit down individually with each person so they didn’t start to undermine our roll-out.”
Another member took training one step further, helping new users understand the impact of the decisions they would be making with their new data and the business strategies they should be putting in place as a result. “Training was the keystone of success all along.” 
The opposite approach is simply to stop creating paper reports altogether. A jarring tactic, no doubt, but one that when matched with executive support can be equally effective: “The first report we automated was a monthly report we called the ‘blue book’,” says one member. “People were scared when we stopped printing it. But our CEO had said ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ We told people they could go online and print out whatever they needed - they didn’t need all 70 pages.” Going "cold turkey" does have its benefits
This “cold turkey” approach, members say, achieves two important goals: first, it boosts system efficiency by reducing the amount of information traveling through your network. “Our IT team wasn’t happy about the huge PDF files clogging up their email servers,” says one member. Second, it keeps the solution relevant to your users by encouraging them to specify the information they need, rather than asking for everything “just in case.”
“We stopped mailing out reports and just waited until somebody asked, ‘Where’s my information?’,” says one member. “We’ve really tied to get things into a pull-oriented system where people are going and getting what they need.” But hands-on training can work well, too
Hands-on training, on the other hand, is resource-intensive and usually slow. But members appreciate the way it can win over the skeptics: “You always have a handful of people who are going to be difficult,” says one member. “We sat down with them to make sure they were OK and understood what they had to do. Then we had the best salespeople in the whole company. That smoothed our rollout of the whole process.”
Some use a hybrid approach
Other members have found success using a hybrid approach. One member discovered her executives were ignoring the Web portal her team had built and instead were asking their assistants to print off the reports. So she combined the familiarity of paper with the promise of additional data online:
“We gave them the report they’d always had, but said, ‘On the portal, there’s drill-down information. If something here doesn’t make sense and you want to understand why, click on this link, go to this report and get more out of it.’ Suddenly, they thought ‘Wow, we can understand what’s behind the problem.’”
“Don’t overwhelm new users with options. Don’t ask them about the business model. Just show them how they can find the answer quickly.” 
Others put some “skin in the game”
An altogether different approach is to use the same solution as your users. Showing you have “skin in the game” demonstrates your commitment to the solution and to their own success. Also, says one member, it helps you avoid creating the perception that the solution is being imposed from upon high: “We got the sales directors to say, ‘Here are the 15 reports that we’re all going to use. We’re not shoving them down your throats. They’re coming from me.’”
“Our users didn’t want unfettered access to the data. What they wanted was a guided path to the answers.”
From adoption to ownership
For organizations further along their performance management journeys, the challenge is less about users trusting the tools as it is taking ownership of them. The greater their sense of ownership, members say, the greater their sense of accountability for results: “We’ve actually turned our development environment over to our end users,” says one member. “We teach them how to build their own scorecards. Suddenly they really care about what’s happening.”
“It’s becoming a more organic environment – a lot less ‘Thou shalt do it.’”
In these situations, your task will be to fill in the gaps left open during your original roll-out. If your deployment began in the C-suite for example, look for ways to connect users on the frontlines. “We’re trying to make things a lot closer to home, more departmentally focused,” says one member. “We’ve tried to build more accountability and do more things more bottom-up instead of top-down.”
If you began on a smaller scale, your challenge will be to find an advocate who can bring the benefits to an executive’s attention: “We had good bottom up buy-in, but no initial executive sponsorship,” says one member. “We’d been working on it for three years but couldn’t get any resources until our CEO said ‘I really wish I could have this.’” 
Make the solution relevant
Building a successful adoption strategy means making your solution as relevant to your users’ daily tasks and decisions as possible. But which approach should you choose? There is no “right” answer, but members do agree that need to understand your users’ desire for change before you can convince them of the benefits of your solution. “Only do or change as much as the business can absorb,” says one member. “Do a little at a time.” You also need to understand the reasons why adoption rates are low. Building users’ comfort with and trust of the tools will be essential. But with patience and persistence even your most ardent opponents can become your strongest supporters.
Summary
Every performance management deployment is a journey of continuous incremental improvements. And as Innovation Center members have demonstrated, it is indeed possible to achieve them within a dynamic business environment. Part of the answer is to build adoption strategies that lead users to discover the benefits of your approach. 
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