How do you foster user adoption and satisfaction in MIS projects?

Think of users as customers, and listen to the voice of the customer. Start change management activities early, and promote the new system as an enabler that is intended to fit into the overall process of getting work done.

Go talk to the users first. They want to be heard. I recommend doing one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and surveys/questionnaires. Obviously it’s impossible to make everyone happy, but it’s good to know up front what each of the stakeholders want and getting as much info as possible on what they really need.

Engage your end users early and often to ensure MIS projects realize maximum user adoption and satisfaction. Secondly, understand the needs and pain points of the users through interviews, surveys, and usability testing. Comprehensive training and support: role-based training, hands-on practice, self-service resources, and a dedicated support team. User-friendly interfaces map to users' mental models of the tasks they perform. Open communication throughout: share your vision, goals, and benefits. Thus, most organizations remain highly assured about user acceptance and satisfaction in MIS projects through the efficient management of change and continuous improvement, coupled with adherence to business objectives.

Agree end user involvement in the design and testing is key to a successful project. Selecting seasoned users that understand the pain points being solved by project is just as key.

The best product teams always recruit focus groups to give input and feedback at each phase of development. Ideally, you want to find a team of “power” users for the system that is being replaced or updated. These people can give you ideas on what to design, give iterative feedback after each phase of development, and help test before the system or new feature is launched.

The best option is: "Involve users in the design and testing process". Involving users in the design and testing process is crucial because it: - Ensures the system meets their needs and expectations - Builds trust and ownership among users - Identifies and addresses potential issues early on - Increases user adoption and satisfaction By involving users, you can create a sense of ownership and accountability, making them more invested in the success of the MIS project. This leads to higher adoption rates and greater overall satisfaction.

Include common scenarios faced by the users in their day to day work, and demonstrate how their current ways of working will evolve to incorporate the features and functionality of the new system. This brings it to life and moves the focus from technical proficiency to enablement, and helps promote adoption.

To make users love the new system, if possible you want to do an educational campaign for the new system or feature launch and initially resource a robust, high quality support team. For training, ideally you want to do: in-person training with a demo and step-by-step tutorial, online training, video, training publications, and even cheat sheets. For support, it is best to staff a team who is trained and on-call when needed.

To maximize user adoption, communication should be managed as part of a strategic marketing campaign. For implementation projects, you need to know who all of the stakeholders are and how best to reach each one of them. Just email will not suffice. For large projects it is good to hold quarterly sensing sessions or town hall meetings, weekly or monthly progress meetings, and to regularly meet with different “power” users to get their feedback and at let them know that their input is important.

Your management information system (MIS) likely has features to monitor user performance. This data will give a baseline on user adoption, performance, error rate and overall usage. However, the data needs to be understood through one-on-one interviews, sensing sessions, workshops, town halls, surveys/questionnaires, etc. This feedback should prompt another update in the MIS lifecycle.