Consider Your Software a New Employee

Bumps in the road are inevitable when a new person joins your team at work. Everything is new to him/her and he/she is new to you, and it will take some time before everyone is a fully integrated team. New team members must learn the routine and the expectations in addition to mastering his/her new job and keeping up with the new workload. The members of the already established team are also involved, getting to know the new person, helping establish a place for him/her on the team, and helping him/her get acclimated.

You may not have thought of it this way, but software is a team member as well. Implementing new software can result in many of the aforementioned issues, as it is quite like hiring a new employee. The process starts when you’re evaluating (interviewing) the available software programs to find the best fit for your company. Just like a job applicant, some software will claim to have qualifications and talents that it simply does not have. Therefore, you’ll have to read “résumés” before eventually hiring (purchasing) the software and putting it to work.

The trial phase of the software’s “employment” with you is the time to get to know it and determine its true capabilities. There are will be things that aren’t as good as you’d hoped they’d be, and there will be things that are better than you expected. This goes with the territory of getting a new employee, human or computerized. The important thing is that the software performs, at the very least, to the standards of the software it’s replacing.

From the first day it’s installed, it becomes the “new kid” in the office and will be met with an abundance of scrutiny. There will be some members of the team that won’t like it simply because it’s new. Generally speaking, people don’t like change, and the truth is that implementing new software is a big and challenging change. It requires learning new things and will inevitably be met with some resistance in the beginning. This is especially true if the old software has been around a while and is easily used by the employees.

Learning to work with and contribute to the team is difficult for humans, but with software, it’s the opposite – the team must learn to accept the new software and its contributions to the team. In order to minimize the disruption that is often caused by a new software implementation, it’s best to allow each employee to practice with it before they must use it “for real.” Training is essential; effective training will make or break the situation, as people who are well-trained in the use of something and confident about their abilities will readily embrace a new team member.

Please contact Mantralogix if you have questions about new software integration and how to go about it properly. We can help ease the difficult process of getting a new team member.