Intro:
Welcome to the Contract Lens Podcast, brought to you by Malbek. In this podcast, we have conversations with contract management thought leaders and practitioners about everything contracts and its ecosystem. Today's episode focuses on user adoption in contract management, and we are joined by Sumi Trombley, senior legal operations consultant at UpLevel Ops. Sumi is an experienced customer-focused attorney with a demonstrated history of working in the finance, information technology and services industry. With a background in both in-house legal departments and law firms, Sumi is known for her ability to provide strategic guidance on cost effective solutions. So now, it's time to relax, grab a glass of wine and let's talk contracts.
Jaime:
Okay, welcome to our Contract Lens Podcast latest edition. Today, I am excited to be joined by Sumi. Hi Sumi, how are you?
Sumi:
Good. How are you?
Jaime:
So excited to be talking with you today. Good, good. I think we have a great topic today. I know both of us are passionate about this, and have a lot of thoughts around user adoption in contract management. This is something that, in any technical solution or business process, it's key to success. And, there are so many factors that can go into what makes for meaningful and successful user adoption. I think especially in contract management, it's important to get this right because with low adoption, your users could be going offline and you really lose visibility and all the benefits you were looking for in the first place.
Jaime:
It's something that I know I think a lot about, through the onboarding and support process with our customers. And, we try to help support our customers in promoting thought around this early on, so I'm really looking forward to our discussion and your advice on how to make the most and prepare for this, so that all the hard work that's put into an initiative around both technology and process does not go by the wayside due to a lack of adoption. I know with your vast experience as both a legal professional and as a legal operations process expert, you will have so much to say so let's dive right in today.
Jaime:
Question number one in any initiative is where to start and when. So when thinking about and planning for a new contract lifecycle management solution or a new contracting process, where do you start when it comes to ensuring that you will promote user adoption? And, when do you need to start thinking about this?
Sumi:
I laugh because it's when did you stop thinking about it, because when you stop thinking about it is when you're going to have the problem.
Sumi:
Really, I think you start at the beginning when you're thinking about how do you define success for your implementation. If you're going to say, "Success means that our users are using it," you need to start thinking about how we get them to use it. What are the key criteria? When you're selecting a tool, you need to identify who are the users, and then begin to understand what the users need. It might be the legal department, it might be your sales team whose requesting contracts, it might be interfacing with your procurement team or your finance team, but understanding who is going to be using the tool is key. And of course, we talk about how you bring them along in the process, but if you're not thinking about it in the beginning, it's going to be too late at the end to make sure that you have user adoption.
Jaime:
Yeah, that's an excellent point. You mentioned different audiences. So before you even select the tool, and this isn't tool driven ... This is about a strategy early on, that includes defining what each of those groups needs and what are the lean business processes that are equally important to this.
Jaime:
So in going through that effort and evaluating those different groups, what do you think are important tools, methods, or people resources that really need to be involved in this needs analysis? What do you recommend, what have you seen work as a strategy?
Sumi:
First of all, we talk very clearly, when we work with our clients, about creating the business use cases. So it starts with communication and how do you build those use cases, you have to start communicating with those stakeholders, understanding what their pain points are. And then, communicating expectations about those business cases. "We're going to solve for this." You're not going to solve, in the first instance, for the entire universe. But, bringing your users along for the ride through communication, through the selection process ... If you're having demos with vendors, you may not want them to be in the first demo, as you're narrowing it down, but bringing them along for maybe the final decision, showing them how its working.
Sumi:
I think that's really, really important to understand that if you're considering them as your key stakeholders or your users, they should be involved in the process. Or, feel like their opinion is valued so that, when it comes time to the change management of it, they're going to be your advocates within the organization. They've seen the tool used, they understand the tool, and they can talk to the people around them to say, "Oh, there's this tool and here's how it works." It's just another way to effectuate a good change management.
Sumi:
Another thing that I think is really important is training. People don't often think about training. They think, "If I've picked a tool that's intuitive, people should just be able to figure it out on their own." And, that may be the case but it's just not useful if maybe 5% of your user base is going to experiment and figure it out. Having tools available that are not just in the beginning, but throughout the use of the tool, the term of your contract with the tool, having them available is going to be key to success.
Jaime:
Yes. And, so many things there you said that were really important, and you brought in the element of change management which is really key, and focusing on that early on. And a big part of that, you mentioned the use cases, and what are the use cases of the different users. So it's making sure that you're really solving a true need. Each of those different communities are going to have different use cases and different needs, so I completely agree with you about making sure you focus in on that need in those different areas. I've also seen, with our customers, what you said about communicating throughout the process, so early adoption and really making it targeted.
Jaime:
Do you recommend, when we talk about communication early on and we'll come back to training ... But, with a change management plan and communication, in my experience, it seems to work best when you do that with different groups. But, how do you typically recommend? Is it overall communication, or focusing in on just the specific needs of those groups so they really feel the "what's in it for me" perspective?
Sumi:
Oh, absolutely. You know, I think there's a need for both. Introducing it as a whole, introducing the platform, and showcasing the fact that this is going on in your organization is useful to give people insight into it, into the process. But for sure, the communication about what each person is going to be involved with, that role-based communication, is going to be key. Because most of the time, you get these big emails, "Oh, we're doing this new initiative." We're all sitting at our computer, getting 1000 emails a day. You see it and you're like, "Okay, I'll just deal with it when it affects me." So making sure you have that communication about how it's going to affect that person and in their role is going to be very key in getting them to start turning on their brain to focusing on what you're asking them, or what you're telling them, about the tool.
Jaime:
Exactly. Yeah, going back to the fundamentals of change management and, "What does this mean for me? What exactly is changing? Why is this better?" Those are all great points, and making it really specific to that group or that user.
Jaime:
Another thing that you talked about was the training. I always feel this is something that really deserves the energy, and time and attention throughout the process. And, not just at the beginning but also, as you said, refresher training, make sure it's continuous after the fact. When you think about continued adoption for the longterm, what are some strategies or methods to make sure that user adoption takes hold from the beginning? But then, as business changes, user behavior changes or needs change, how do you keep a pulse on that and make sure that the end users are still familiar? Because it's not just about the tool, as you said, it's a lot to do with the process.
Sumi:
Yeah. I think what we said at the very beginning, which is when do you stop thinking about it, because you shouldn't ever stop thinking about are your users using it, is it effective, what are your use cases. So the initial thought process that goes into selecting the tool should be a continuous question and evaluation throughout the lifecycle of your tool.
Sumi:
In the beginning, you're trying to define parameters so that you select the right tool. Well, a year in, is it still the right tool for you? Are you getting the pieces out of it? So having those SLAs, or understanding volume. How do we define success? Some people may say, "It's because we've gotten 100% of our NDAs through our CLM tool." Or, "It's that our emails in our general inbox went from 100 to five a day." It's just like defining what that success is, and then actually going back throughout the process and say, "Are we getting there? Are we getting what we expected out of this tool, based on those success criteria?"
Sumi:
And then, if you're not then reach out. Reach out to your users. And even if you are, reach out to your users. Ask them what's working, what's not working, part of the success is the engagement. And they say, "Well, now that you mention it, this piece is really trick for me." Oh, okay. Well, maybe there's a way you can make it easier. You might adoption right now, but you might actually enable, win over somebody who's going to be your advocate if you start to develop a good relationship with your users and get good feedback. It's continuously changing, in terms of phase one may be your NDA, but as you begin to build out your other phases in our implementation, you're bringing people along.
Jaime:
Yes. You know, one thing that you said that triggered another thought was sometimes I think that in trying to gather that data, organizations might be afraid of what the users might say so they're not prepared for that. It's just, as you said, being honest and letting the users know, "We want to hear what you have to say. We want to hear what's working, what's not." And then, having a plan to be able to act on that is really important, so that you're not going to be able to solve every problem but you should have a plan of what you're going to do with data, and how you're going to bring it forward.
Jaime:
Are there any particular ... You mentioned some metrics there. But, any other tracking points, or what maybe organizations could look for from their vendor? Or, from a company like UpLevel Ops to help them with that?
Sumi:
Yeah. Often times, we'll just tell companies to begin doing customer surveys to understand are they meeting their needs. Sometimes, UpLevel will come in and we'll do assessments of legal departments. Even if you have a contract management tool but you're not sure, we can come in and we can do the interviews, and that's overstating what they are. But, they're really just conversations like this, asking folks about what their experience. "Do you like your tool? Do you not like your tool? What works, what doesn't work?" Not just in the tool framework, but we do it with other pieces of the legal operations framework. But, it really is quite insightful, both for the legal department but also for other stakeholders. And they feel like, "Oh okay, this is how the legal department wants to know how they're doing." That, I think, resonates with people across the board. So that's what we can do.
Sumi:
And then, often, if there are gaps or we identify gaps that user are saying, "This isn't working," we typically will say, "Okay, have you talked to the vendor? Have you reached out to the vendor, to see if those capabilities or that functionality is available?" One of the things that we recommend often is to talk to the vendors periodically. They'll send emails about, "These are your new features," but get a demo from them, a quick demo of the new features, to see if there's things that could improve your current implementation. And maybe, you implemented it a year ago but there have been so many advancements, I would say 99% of the tools, in about three months, so there might be facets of the tool that you're not using. So going back and having that constant communication, both with your clients, meaning your business users and your constituents within your organization, but also having the conversations with the vendor to see where you can improve.
Sumi:
And then, there are some cases where you may have outgrown the tool. And in that instance, we can help you go back to the drawing board, figure out what are your business cases, what are your use cases, and we can help identify and walk you through the tool selection process.
Jaime:
Yes. And, what you said there circles back to the beginning, too. In the selection process, finding out what the vendors do offer in terms of continued knowledge and information about what's new in the product. I know at Malbek we like to do those health checks, because we are always releasing new features. So something may not have been perfect at one point, but maybe with things that have changed in your process or in the tool, now there's a better solution. That constant cycle of evaluating things I think is really important. As you said, never stop. It's something that you should do early in the process, but then also often and just continuously to ensure that.
Sumi:
That brings up another thing I constantly think about, which is a tool has to be nurtured and there has to be somebody within the organization whose going to be doing that. That gets to the heart of legal operations in any organization. You need to have some sort of system administrator who is there to talk to the constituents, whose there to nurture the vendor. Building the tool and just leaving it static is a guaranteed way to not have user adoption. If anything, it's really a plug for just legal operations' function within a legal department.
Jaime:
Yeah. And in larger organizations, I think that's really key, what you said. For any size organization, but even if you have bigger teams, beyond that person you could also designate champions within your business units, who help you keep the pulse on how things are going. Do you see that often? Do you recommend that?
Sumi:
Oh yeah, I think you came up with the better word. But yeah, they're going to be your advocates or your champions throughout. They're going to be the ones that, like you said, finger on the pulse within the department. "This is working, this is not working."
Sumi:
They don't have to be the person who takes it on and fixes it, but they can be the person who just knows who the business function works and the process works, and can share that with the legal operations function.
Jaime:
And, they could also help with training as well. So training, doing that overall training, and then user focused training. I know with some of our clients, they've done videos, and done some training sessions through champions. But then, also hold open office hours for users to come in and ask questions. Giving those forums is always a good way to catch some of those things that might be missed, or not come up in surveys, or general support channels for users to come to you. It gives them another way to express what they need, or what challenges or roadblocks they might be facing. Yeah, all great advice.
Jaime:
Well, I think we've talked about a lot of things. But in summary, I would say that in order to promote longterm and successful user adoption, I think that you had mentioned, it's communicating and having a strategy from the very beginning, and ensuring that you're always cycling back to that and measuring against it. You've given some great advice. And also, the ownership, making sure that someone internally is designated for that, and that you don't implement and forget. All great advice.
Jaime:
Is there anything else that you would share in closing, as we wrap up this conversation today?
Sumi:
I know that it can be overwhelming, having worked with a lot of clients, some of whom that have selected a tool and are just frustrated, they know it's not working, they just don't know why. Or, they're so overwhelmed because they're a brand new company and they know they need a tool, but they just are overwhelmed with the possibility of coming into the market and there are so many options. One of the things that we do at UpLevel is help take that piece off of their plate, and help them navigate that selection process.
Sumi:
So if anything, I know we've said a lot and we've unpacked a lot of work that needs to be done, but there is help out there. Whether it's at the vendor, talking to folks like you, the customer success team at the vendor, or talking to folks like us, there is help out there and we're here to enable it. It gives me no more pride and happiness to see clients succeed in having the user adoption. Whether it's even a single NDA self-service, or this complex workflow, it doesn't matter. But, if it means success for the organization, then that's great.
Jaime:
And, think about how you could get success in multiple cycles. You don't have to do all that work at once, you look for tools and develop your goals that will help you win quick successes, and there may be multiple iterations of that. So all that work doesn't have to be done all at once, you really can look at what's most important and look for those quick wins. And then, continue from there.
Sumi:
Absolutely. The phased piece is also key. Take off small bites.
Jaime:
As is many things in life, and it makes it easier. And especially with the way things, business really change frequently and often today, I think that that's something that we all have to keep in mind and try to be more agile in how we accomplish our goals.
Sumi:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jaime:
Sumi, for organizations that may want to take advantage of help, would you mind just sharing how to find UpLevel Ops? And, if you have any special events or things coming up in the coming weeks?
Sumi:
Yeah. So uplevelops.com, UpLevel Ops is one word. We're available and willing to help you. If you just need to brainstorm what it is that you need help with, that's often something that we do for clients. We also have monthly lunch-and-learns that are free and they're super great. They're just about bringing the community together, the legal operations community, and we showcase one or two vendors during the period. But, it's really about talking and networking with your other legal operations professionals and getting to talk about what's happening in the world of legal operations. I would encourage folks to join that. It's in coordination with In House Counsel, as well as UpLevel Ops.
Jaime:
Thank you, again. I know I speak for the Malbek team when we say UpLevel Ops, we really respect the expertise that you bring to the table, and everyone on your team, so thank you.
Sumi:
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
