[caption id="attachment_437" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Cannon"][/caption]

Let’s assume you are manager (or just part of) a small department. The task of the department is to make sure that everybody in the company is using Grglwup for wumpeling and does so in the correct way. What do you do to achieve that?

The approach I see most of the times lets me wonder, if companies are run by Vogons. It looks like this.

A document is written describing the process for wumpeling by use of Grglwup in great detail. It gets published on a newly created website, which nobody knows about.

A 23 step process is put up defining how to get Grglwup, how to get a license for it and who is allowed to use it. It describes the 5 forms 7 signatures and 3 trainings you need, but it lacks any reason, why it is a good idea to us Grglwup instead of Open G which you could download and use for free and which is so easy to use, that anybody will be done with the task of wumpeling within 5 minutes.

Of course nobody adheres to that process. So an evaluation if wumpeling is needed and a 5 day consulting with the fixed result of advising to use Grglwup are made a required and expensive part of every project.

That was easy right? Now nobody can do any wumpeling without Grglwup as desired. At a side effect your department grew by a factor of 5 in order to handle all the consulting. Oh, and the cost of every project increased by about 10.000Euro for the consulting and getting through the whole process. Therefore people will hate you and your department.

I propose a different approach.

Find out why Grglwup must be used. If it is a valid reason, make sure everybody at least in your department understands it. If there aren’t valid reasons, fight the requirement.

Everything else is about making work with Grglwup a pleasure:

Write easy to use and fun to read documentation for it. Prefer a wiki as a platform so everybody can improve on it.

Make sure that that page shows up whenever anybody is searching for Grglwup, wumpeling or Open G on your intranet.

Offer free training for use of Grglwup.

Make the question: “What else can we do to make working with Grglwup easier?” part of every contact with a user.

Make sure that you reply to those that answer the question. Actually reply twice: First to confirm that you received the answer and then when you actually provide something.

You probably would like to have a single way uses address your team with questions about Grglwup. Still you should accept any way of communication: e-Mail, fax, phone or whatever. Don’t make them use your preferred tool. Of course you are free to funnel communication inside your department into a single tool.

Make sure everybody who might need to do some wumpeling, knows about you and your department.

If you succeed in this, everybody use Grglwup because it is the easy, the obvious thing to do.

Of course all this will cost money, just as the first approach. But you can’t charge the users for that. They aren’t the ones that want to use Grglwup. The company wants. So the company should pay for it.