You can’t log on to your computer this week without seeing a trailer, interview or product placement for one of the season’s biggest blockbusters. You’ve watched interviews about the project, the cast, and budget, but you still have till a few more days till you can actually see it.

Naturally I’m talking about your technology rollout.

What?!

What do you mean you haven’t heard about that?

You thought I was talking about a movie?

You thought the trailer was for Jurassic World and the interviews and cast I was referring to were with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (aka Richie Cunningham’s daughter, no relation)?

Imagine if you could create a similar level of buzz and excitement for your technology launch and rollout.  In fact you can, and you don’t have to be Steven Spielberg to pull it off.

Interested?

I had a college professor tell me if you want to make something memorable, try taking two things you know and putting them in a combination you don’t know. Kinda like I did with this post.

While you don’t have a big movie set to make a blockbuster (or the budget), you can be inspired by what you see and create similar excitement for your projects. This will help make your technology rollout be something people look forward to. From a project perspective it will increase user adoption and ideally reduce long-term support costs. These key items will help protect your project investment because it answers a lot of questions people have prior to rollouts:

  • What is it?
  • What does it do?
  • What is it replacing?
  • How does this impact me?
  • When will this happen?
  • Where can I go for more information?

Are you in? Let’s get started with a few easy tips inspired by the summer blockbusters to infuse some enthusiasm around your technology rollout.

From the Movies

Inspired for your Rollout

Project Benefit

Play movie trailers months in advance to get you interested in the upcoming movie

Create a short video about the technology and circulate it early in the project. You can create a contest to get people to want to watch it.

A video creates excitement around cool features, big wins for users, and starts the conversation about the program.

Press with the stars

Send emails, post articles or short interviews with the project team about the project.

Interviews create a face for the project, as well as establish the realness of the pending launch.

Product placement

If budget allows, try advertising your project; Create a theme or mascot.

Typically the more people know about something, the more likely they are to want to participate or at minimum, will be less likely to resist change because they had time to process the new technology.

Report on box office sales

Communications on project wins.

“Trained 200 people this week”, “Shorten client wait times by 15 minutes after the first week!”

Validating success through examples encourages people who are on the system to keep up the great work and getting the groups coming up for rollout something tangible to look forward to.

Interview movie goers What do you think? Immediate feedback allows for enforcement of what is great and quick adjustments for items that aren’t quite right.

People need to be heard.  If there is a feature or process that is great, use it in a sound bite or quote. If there is an easy fix you can make based on the feedback, show how user feedback is utilized and valued. Users are more willing to stick with the adoption period while you work out any bugs if they feel their opinion counts.

Sound like a doable plan?  Grab your popcorn and let’s get started!

See you at the launch!