Are there any innovative processes that can accelerate a new software product introduction in enterprise?

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I'm not using or aware of anyone in the company using something I would call &#34;innovative&#34; in the process. However for every rollout we have named business partners that all go through training on the software prior to rollout. And we also have business user &#34;champions&#34; who are trained in the application in depth prior to rollout and are to be users first contact for the first several weeks of deployment. The business users are actually first contact before the Service Desk. I wish I could say it worked every deployment, but it didn't. If those champions were to over worked, they directed everyone straight to Service Desk, which of course didn't know the application in detail, so Service Tickets would need to be created and routed to the application team delaying assistance. In general I would estimate it worked 70% of the time. And we generally knew when Champions were overworked, and prewarned leadership about complaints that would be coming.

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I don't think there are many widely used &#34;innovative process&#34; that is being used for new software introduction. We have a standard training program for end users to the new software product and a POC who ensures there is a smooth transition. This is all built into our Zoho systems.

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Ironically, the most “innovative” approach is good old-fashioned communication.

In many cases change occurs without people really understanding the why behind it, and the what it means for daily use.

My suggestion is to really explain the change. What was the driver? How will it benefit people in their day-to-day? What do they need to differently? And how can they transition from old processes to new; and in what timeframe?

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In healthcare, epic and other big players have their own version of epics orchard which is essentially an App Store for hospitals. In actually building a new software product for enterprise I think the best move is to hire someone from whatever enterprise you’re trying to augment. They’ll know specifics on how to move quickest through the built of friction of enterprise software.

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The words &#34;Enterprise&#34;, &#34;innovative&#34;, and &#34;new software&#34; usually do not work for me together. As you have to pass through 10 levels of management with different priorities and goals, the best approach for me is just to prepare bespoke presentations laser focused on a specific person and something that can bring value specifically to them.

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I'm also not aware of anything innovative and totally agree that it's all about communication. Now if there was something out there, I'd check it out immediately.

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It is difficult to see a &#34;Single Innovative process&#34;; however, many fine-grained incremental innovations are happening in product/tool & processes to improve the overall effectiveness of the new product introduction. Some of the questions which uncover the opportunity areas are who uses the product, end-use cases for the product, what are the difficulties of using the product, what are key trends that make users have different needs, trends make them use the product differently, how the end-user usage is being captured and analyzed, how is the product deployed how do they discover, how do they learn to use, and how do they utilize the features for their maximum benefits, etc. Hence, inbound marketing, Product support, account management, product management, prototyping loop, agile DevOps, outbound marketing, learning, and training are some of the blocks in the overall supply chain for the product introduction. In each block, there are many areas the innovations are happening. Some of the examples, such as AI to pick up end-user configuration, apply AI to find out the most use of the product, participation of users for new features and priorities, participation in agile DevOps, feature voting, dev-ops automation, in-place release, liquid software processes, testing automation, configuration dependency mgmt, learning as you use, etc.

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Many great answers here already. There isn’t much magic, just good old fashioned team work.

Champions
Key users
Documentation (Q&A online)
Broad communication (not just messaging)
Support staff trained up

Note: Sometimes the roll out of a new app is hampered by a fear of change more than problems in use. Make sure your training and communication includes discussions about why the change is needed and how you can safely navigate from old to new.

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Innovative feels like a marketing term. Software NPI is mainly a collaborative task between product management, project management, support, sales, marketing, and engineering. Our NPI processes are mainly waterfall and work as expected most of the time.

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Change is never easy for people even if the change is for good. Effective change management is key or else “the good old days” syndrome kicks in.

So we used the following methodology:

Why are we introducing change (new software or technology)? This meant outlining clear problem statements and actually having the intended users vote on them so we truly understood the priority of the pain points. This also gave the actual users a voice in the process rather than just the key power users or influencers.

Launch communication should then address the WIFM (What’s in it for me). This will demonstrate that we heard their voice.

Tailor the education and training. There is no one size fits all. We did online, classroom-based, or self-learning training for major software rollouts. Also, set up a communication channel that they can easily get to during the early stages of adoption. We utilized Slack and created a dedicated channel where the users can ask questions as they encounter. This reduced the burden on the users for creating tickets and provided instant resolution.

Post-launch check-up. It’s important to do a post-launch pulse check to see how things are going and did we live up to expectations. Also, this gives an opportunity to fine-tune things as well as generate new ideas for improvement or innovation.

Hope this helps.

Are there any innovative processes that can accelerate a new software product introduction in enterprise?

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