Today’s guest post is from John Shaw (Senior Director, Adoption Services) of BravoSolution, a leading provider of spend analysis, (e-)sourcing, supplier performance management (SPM) and healthcare sourcing solutions and a sponsor of Sourcing Innovation (SI). It is the second of an eight (8) part series, which, when complete, will form a white-paper that BravoSolution will be releasing to the general populace next Wednesday.

Yesterday’s post (Part I), which noted that rolling out a technology solution isn’t anything like building the “Field of Dreams“, pointed out that just giving the team the tools they need isn’t enough. The leadership team also needs to acquire a set of tools designed to help their team succeed. In short, they need an “adoption toolkit” to make sure the tools are adopted as standard operating procedure.

Today’s post will introduce the concept of High Definition Adoption Measurement (HDAM), but first, it will frame the problem.

E-Sourcing: A commonly complex adoption challenge

For the purposes of this paper, we’ll discuss Adoption Measurement in the context of e-Sourcing simply because so many organizations use an e-sourcing tool to varying levels of success. It serves as an easy-to-identify-with example. Interestingly, the adoption challenges inherent in e-sourcing can be quite complex. We hope this paper will challenge you take an in-depth look at how you apply adoption measurement in your organization, both for e-sourcing and other solutions you use to support your business.

What is High Definition Adoption Measurement?

High Definition Adoption Measurement is a catchy way of saying that we are going to measure and understand how your organization is using a solution. It is a process of understanding your business case and tailoring a set of standard measurements to create visibility into how well the behaviours of your people are supporting your organization’s goals. It includes sharing these metrics with your team, setting collaborative targets and working towards those targets.
Adoption Measurement serves as the basis for prioritizing opportunities for continual improvement and defining solutions for capitalizing upon those opportunities. It essence, it is the Opportunity Assessment and Wave Planning processes of the Adoption Professional!

Setting the Stage: Understand the Business Case

The first step in measuring adoption is to understand why a particular tool is being implemented by an organization. While this may seem both obvious and easy for something like an e-Sourcing tool, I can assure you that one business case does not fit all organizations, no matter how well the benefits of e-Sourcing have been documented. For our discussion, we will highlight 3 organizations that have been modelled after common customer profiles in BravoSolution’s customer base.

3 Distinct e-Sourcing Needs 

Observe that each of these organizations is trying to solve a different problem with the same e-sourcing tool. Although they all may be able to benefit from using e-Sourcing to achieve additional supplier value, increase transparency to the sourcing process and increase team efficiency, they each have their own focus areas.

Part III will describe the typical view of adoption from 30,000 feet and the useful- and useless-ness of such a view.

Today’s guest post is from John Shaw (Senior Director, Adoption Services) of BravoSolution, a leading provider of spend analysis, (e-)sourcing, supplier performance management (SPM) and healthcare sourcing solutions and a sponsor of Sourcing Innovation (SI). It is the first of an eight (8) part series, which, when complete, will form a white-paper that BravoSolution will be releasing to the general populace next Wednesday. However, since SI is focussed on delivering educational, innovational, and inquisitive content on a regular basis, BravoSolution has been kind enough to give SI readers a first-look.

So you are a seasoned leader in the rapidly maturing field of strategic sourcing and your leadership team continually challenges you to maximize the value of your team to the organization. You are, of course, resource constrained. Before you lay an open field of opportunities, yet you hold in your hands a limited amount of time, money and people.

And so the work begins! You prioritize the opportunities, build a budget and set about bringing the right mix of people, process and tools forward. As a part of this planning, you invest in giving your people the right set of tools and processes for the job. In the field of Strategic Sourcing this usually means the implementation of solutions to support activities like spend analysis, sourcing execution and contract implementation.

Unfortunately, rolling a spend analysis or e-sourcing tool out across a global organization isn’t anything like building the “Field of Dreams“. Just because you’ve built and shared the solution doesn’t mean the team will use it AND use it correctly. Just as a Sourcing Professional needs the right tools in their toolkit, the leadership team needs a set of tools designed to help their people succeed with the solution and tools they have provided. They need an “adoption toolkit” to make sure the solutions and tools are adopted as standard operating procedure.

The Adoption Toolkit

The most successful adoption programs start at the very beginning of the solution implementation project and are institutionalized into the ongoing operations of a business. In practice, most solution implementations are heavily front-loaded. For a period leading up to the “Go-Live”, organizations invest heavily in solution configuration, communications, training, documentation and process consulting. When the solution goes live, the broader team celebrates, claps each other on the back and leaves the solution’s ultimate success to the solution owner and their super users. We’ll call these individuals left in charge of the solution the Adoption Team.

There are a number of critical tools that should be available to the Adoption Team, but the most important by far are the tools by which they will measure the ongoing adoption of the solution by the organization. Measuring adoption progress against a solution’s business case is the single most important element in understanding where to direct the time and energies of the Adoption Team. Without high quality adoption measurement, an Adoption Team is analogous to a ship at sea without a navigation system; the best and most experienced captains may find their way, but the majority will be left drifting without direction or focus.

Part II will define High Definition Adoption Management (HDAM) and describe it in the context of e-sourcing, a commonly complex adoption challenge.