Google Apps for Work - Manual (Page 24)

Phase 1: Core IT
24
Profile your user community | Best practices
As you get started profiling your user community, use these
best practices:
•
Partner with your Human Resources department. Your HR
department is tasked with understanding the people in your
organization. They are one of the groups that communicates with
every employee. Ask HR for information about employee locations
and your company’s language translation practices. Once you have
a complete list of all your user groups, you can estimate the number
of people in each.
• Start with what you know best. In many cases, that’s the IT
department. Identify user groups in IT that might need to use
Gmail and Calendar in unique ways that require special training
or communications. These often include IT administrators and
help desk/support staff. You might identify coaching as a tactic to
help these users learn new support processes.
• Think about the average user. Average users access their email
primarily in the office. They need email for basic communications,
and a calendar to organize meetings; they aren’t performing complex
tasks like managing someone else’s inbox or calendar. For most
organizations, you can include most of your users in this category.
• Identify the special cases. Speciality cases are the people who need
to do unique things with email or calendar for their jobs. A classic
speciality case—the administrative assistant who manages others’
inboxes and calendars. Or a Marketing department that sends fancy
email newsletters to large numbers of customers or a Finance lead
who manages an email queue for vendor responses. You’ll want to
place these users in a special category of your user summary.
“We try to understand who needs a high
touch approach, medium approach, and
a self-service approach.
For high touch: it’s on-site training, execs,
people who are resistant to change. For
medium touch: we have webinar
training delivered by a trainer. For self-
service: we have a site and also an
eLearning solution that is built into the
Apps interface.”
—
Karl Lamberth, Senior Vice
President of Global Delivery,
Cloud Sherpas
Cloud Sherpas is a Google Apps Enterprise
Partner based in the United States.
Don’t forget to reach out to your users Learning from Solarmora, a fictionalized company
Andy knew that he needed information about the
users he didn’t work with on a regular basis—like
those working the smaller field offices—to move
ahead with his change management approach.
Andy created a detailed spreadsheet segmenting
the company’s user community by location,
business function, role, and mobile usage, using
information from a report from the HR department
and his own IT data.
Oops! Andy forgot to check their language
requirements. He focused on making sure that the
communications were in perfect English. But
Solarmora just acquired a Brazilian company that
needed materials in Portuguese. Ultimately, Andy
had to revise his project plan to add time for
translation.
The lesson: Confirm those assumptions with others
in your organization so your user community
summary is accurate.