Technology is the easy part. But do you have buy-in?

Digital projects can fail for non-technical reasons: poor planning, scope creep, mismanaged expectations. These are “known unknowns” that you can prevent with planning and communication. But there's a silent killer that dooms a digital project before a single line of code is written: failure to get buy-in.

Here’s a common scenario: the head of operations launches an effort to consolidate disparate digital platforms under one roof as a dashboard or employee portal. This unified tool is going to pull information from all the legacy systems into one convenient, easy-to-use control center for customer support, accounting, marketing, and operations. The project is approved by management and the engineering team makes swift progress. 

Then comes the first demo meeting for all the stakeholders. The shock comes when the customer support head says “we can’t use this.” 

Turns out nobody asked the potential users what challenges they face and where they need help, those things were just assumed. To rescue the situation, engineering starts on change orders, which introduce scope creep, and the project eventually fails or finishes late and over budget.

Projects with multiple stakeholders (which is to say, all of them) require participation from all potential users (and not just the bosses) to be successful. It’s not enough to share your plans and progress, you must involve them in all stages. There are two reasons for this: 

1. Functions of various departments are usually a lot more complex than you initially imagine. It’s impossible to build a suitable solution without studying user journeys and finding the friction points of the stakeholders.
2. Internal organizations or departments tend to be siloed and resistant to change. 

When you’ve been able to successfully negotiate the integration of the future software with all stakeholders and include them in the planning process, you’ve achieved buy-in. And your project is much more likely to succeed. 

Be the linchpin

Corporate culture is risk-averse. Successful implementation of a digital product requires someone who is willing to stick their neck out for the idea and negotiate on its behalf with leadership as well as fellow managers: a linchpin. If there’s no such person and everyone punts or passes the buck, the quality of the decision will gravitate towards low-efficiency compromises.

As a linchpin, you need to get buy-in from two groups of stakeholders: the executives and future users.

Executives 

Unless you have the decision-making power, you need a champion on the executive team. Find someone who believes in the idea and will help you overcome the obstacles in the boardroom as well as get cooperation from stakeholders within the company. 

Pro tip. To get buy-in from an executive, present the case for your project in terms of ROI: show how you can increase profits or optimize expenses with this initiative.

Future users 

Users of the future system can be internal or external, but the process for both is similar: listen to where the friction in their process is and address it in the software. A great tool for this is User Journey Mapping, which helps to visualize the friction points and allows you to prioritize them. This creates an ordered backlog of actual problems to solve for each user group.

Then, share your vision of a better future for them through this product. In our scenario, answer the question of how using the new software will help the customer service team resolve customer issues faster, reducing the load on the department. They need to see how this thing will benefit them personally as well as their department before they will be excited about it.

Share your vision effectively

I recommend investing in a clickable UX prototype as the vision tool for getting buy-in with both the executives and future users. It’s a great method for projecting future reality onto the current situation. It’s one thing to make a deck about what the future functionality could be, but a clickable prototype can show everyone how their work routine could change. It’s a powerful tool.

Building software is hard enough. In the end, your mission is to get these stakeholders on your side and actually excited about the changes the new system will bring to their work lives.