8 Best Practices for Successful Zoom Adoption
Now that you have decided to roll out Zoom DAM/MAM for your team, how do you ensure Zoom is successfully adopted by your user base?
Change is hard.
Over many years the Evolphin team has been involved with many MAM deployments and has uncovered the secrets to the success of any rollout. Here are the top 8 best practices we recommend:
1 Breakdown the Kitchen Sink Syndrome
Let’s say your team has done a deep dive into the features & benefits of Zoom via live product demos or Proof of concepts (PoCs). It’s natural for some of the most inquisitive stakeholders to dive into the breadth of features offered by Zoom. While this may be very satisfying to the motivated stakeholders involved, the rest of the user base might be feeling overwhelmed with the feature creep.
It’s important to make people feel comfortable by explaining that they do not need to learn and use all of the features that Zoom has to offer, they just need to use those features that will make their lives easier. Your goal with Zoom is to complement what people do and not give them more to do! For example, a studio operations team might need to just be into ingesting new content from camera cards. They do not need to know all the nuances of Zoom smart copy workflows for sharing content with freelancers!
Ask yourself, is drag-n-drop that different between macOS Finder and Zoom Desktop app? If a user knows how to use Finder, they can get started with the Zoom Desktop app easily.
2 Keep improvising through feedback
Lose the “kitchen-sink” syndrome and instead drive user adoption through continuous engagement with your team. Keep user expectations and UX top of mind, and follow up regularly with users to see what’s working or not working for them. Identify early on, tweaks in Zoom configuration settings based on their feedback. Schedule regular check-ins, administer surveys using for example Google Forms or simply ask, “How’s the Zoom app working out for you?”
You’ll likely delight your users because you’re displaying a genuine empathy for them, and you’ll benefit from being on the receiving end of their feedback. Incorporate that into your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) workflows at launch.
3 Avoid analysis-paralysis
A lot of media managers come to us and want to be ‘told’ how they should setup the Zoom MAM for a successful rollout. This is akin to asking the person who sold you a smartphone to configure all the settings and alerts that make the phone your phone. Embrace the fact that you have total flexibility and can tailor the Zoom application for your team’s specific needs. In other words, map it to your workflows, not Evolphin’s. For some fear of messing up can lead to an analysis-paralysis state. Resist that like the plague.
Try different Zoom configurations until you find the one that works perfectly for you. Experiment and make every effort to get user feedback. It’s an iterative process; if for example you made a wrong decision about a folder structure for video editors, just go ahead and change it in Zoom and move the existing projects to the new folder structure. Zoom can automatically relink any broken links due to reorganization of files and folders!
4 Get early wins
While your pain-point based user stories might require a lot of new workflows to implement and get adopted, there are many quick wins that you can achieve during the system rollout:
- Ingest to the cloud repository using drag-n-drop into the Zoom desktop app similar to a Google Drive or a Mac Finder. Once everyone is ingesting the content into a common repository, accessing & finding content from a centralized location is easy.
- Migrate your archives to the Zoom Cloud repository – this would open up users’ minds to all sorts of content that has been locked away in drives, tapes, storage islands etc. When new users can see thumbnails and previews of their archived files from anywhere for the first time, they will see the value and will realize why a solution like Zoom will make their lives so much easier
- Collaboration, Reviews using Zoom Web Collection – this is the one tool that everyone can use on any device. Most teams have been using multiple channels to receive feedback. Being able to consolidate all of that into a unified collection UI is empowering. It also leads to a virtuous cycle – the collection users who are often business owners will start demanding that the creatives send them review links via Zoom. That in turn will motivate the creatives to use the Zoom Adobe CC plugins.
5 Communicate early wins
As the system is rolled out, provide updates to leadership and your team. Momentum and excitement will gather speed if you can communicate quick wins and simple numbers that everyone can relate to, like this week we ingested 4000 files/2 TB of content and created proxies for 70 hours of footage! Zoom has a lot of trend reports that you can use to show and communicate progress.
6 Organize rollout in Chunks
No one wants to wade through pages & pages of documentation or hours of training just to find out how to log in to the Zoom app or search for an asset. Organize the roll-out plan into digestible chunks that make it simple for users to find what they need. Because the easier it is to scan for relevant information quickly, the less likely you’ll be answering emails or Slack to provide what should be intuitive guidance.
That might mean, don’t train your users in one shot on all the MVP workflows or features they will use later. Do it in sprints. For example, the first week may be dedicated to set up, basic configuration and browsing. Second week, may be targeted at searching with metadata, check-in process versioning.
7 Provide Examples
Each user story around your pain points should not only translate into an MVP workflow in Zoom, but users’ should be provided an example of the workflow in action. Either via a short demo or a cheat sheet. Don’t leave it to the end users to read and map it all out. Make it easier for them to adopt by leading with examples. If you train them, make it task driven. Ask them to interactively implement a workflow rather than broadcast a how-to demo over a web meeting.
8 Create a Sense of urgency
- As mentioned in the buy-in article, be very clear to your users on why the Zoom MAM is being implemented; write it down so that people can see it
- Consider the consequences of not following the MAM workflows; what for example will happen if the status quo is maintained?
- Include current problems and challenges that are expected to be resolved when the Zoom MAM is rolled out & adopted
- Create a set of measurable metrics focused on beginning state and end state so that you can measure the success (or not) of the rollout. This might lead you to track for example how the time to locate content went down from 3 hours to 5 mins a week.
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