Sunday January 23, 2005

JDS Change Acceptance Ideas

I had an interesting conversation with a coworker in another division on Friday. He is not running JDS (he is still running CDE). He is aware of the need to eventually switch but he is in no hurry. He says he wants a few free hours to make the switch and become familiar with the new user interface. I suspect he is typical of a significant portion of our user base.

I like trying new things but a lot of people don't like change and would prefer to stay with what is comfortable. Our conversation made me realize again how much continuous effort you have to put into making what in this case is a fairly simple change happen.

In our change acceptance meeting on Friday we brainstormed what we could do to get more people to make the switch. Here are some of the ideas we came up with.

We need to convert more of our system administrators into advocates for JDS. They are highly influential and if we talk to them individually and address any concerns they might have it might help. We can also enlist their managers to urge them to become active supporters.

Making JDS the default will help considerably. We will be doing this in a couple of weeks

We could create barometers that we hang in visible places or on the internal home page. Or we could widely distribute a weekly status report which shows how much each group or site has converted. Competition could help.

We could make CDE less stable or slower or make it inconvenient to use CDE. This might work but I think there is a good chance it would back fire.

We could promote cool features of JDS that would make people want to switch.

We could target managers / key influencers and ask them to urge their people to make the change.

We could do a once a week email to all CDE users asking them to switch.

A lot of these seem like good ideas that I can start to make happen.