BI User Adoption Strategies

📊 Prosci + ADKAR: Powering Product Adoption for Power BI Dashboards Let’s be honest—building a Power BI dashboard is the easy part. Getting people to actually use it? That’s where the real challenge begins. Rolling out a new data product isn’t just a technical project; it’s a change management initiative. Whether it’s a sleek executive scorecard or a multidimensional analytics tool, adoption depends on people understanding why it matters, learning how to use it, and incorporating it into their daily decision-making. That’s where Prosci’s ADKAR model comes in. 🧠 Awareness: Show the “Why” Behind the Dashboard Awareness isn’t just announcing, “Here’s your new dashboard!” It’s explaining what problems this tool solves. Is it reducing manual reporting? Giving leadership a single source of truth? Supporting compliance? Make the “why” real with a story: show a before/after comparison, or demo how much time it saves. When people see that this tool removes pain points, they lean in. 💡 Desire: Make Them Want to Use It Even with a great dashboard, you might get some crossed arms and a “let’s see how this goes.” Build desire by showing quick wins and celebrating early adopters. Highlight teams that use the dashboard to make better decisions or save hours of manual effort. Peer validation is powerful—if other teams are succeeding with it, others will follow. 📚 Knowledge: Teach More Than Just Buttons Knowledge is where you go beyond “click here to filter.” Explain how the dashboard fits into workflows, KPIs, and decision-making. Offer micro-trainings, tooltips, and short videos. Tailor training for different user groups—executives may want high-level insights, while analysts might need drill-downs and export functionality. 🛠 Ability: Practice Makes Perfect Ability grows when users get hands-on time with the tool. Encourage them to bring real business questions to training sessions. Give them a sandbox environment to experiment without fear of “breaking” something. Provide quick support channels (Teams chat, office hours) so they feel safe trying it out. 🌱 Reinforcement: Keep the Momentum Alive Reinforcement is where adoption becomes habit. Track usage metrics and share progress with leadership. Celebrate milestones—like “95% of managers now use the dashboard weekly.” Keep content fresh with new views, updated KPIs, or automated alerts so it remains relevant. ✨ The Takeaway A Power BI dashboard isn’t successful just because it was built—it’s successful when it drives better decisions, faster. Prosci’s ADKAR model gives you a roadmap for making that happen: - Awareness: Share the why - Desire: Build motivation - Knowledge: Teach effectively - Ability: Create space for practice - Reinforcement: Celebrate, measure, repeat When you combine strong change management with a human-centered rollout, your dashboard stops being “just another tool” and becomes an indispensable part of your organization’s decision-making engine.

📌 The Dashboard Adoption Roadmap You don’t fix low dashboard adoption by adding more visuals. Or tweaking colors. Or throwing in one more slicer. You fix it by addressing what’s really broken: → Data people don’t trust → KPIs that lack clarity or ownership → Dashboards disconnected from real decisions Most adoption problems aren’t UX issues. They’re the result of strategic failures. I’ve seen it across industries and company sizes. No matter how advanced the BI tool is or how clean the dashboard looks... When relevance is missing, the result is the same: users stop showing up. Here’s what I’ve learned over the last 12 months: Dashboards don’t fail because of poor design. They fail because they’re irrelevant. → Irrelevant to the decisions people need to make → Irrelevant to how teams actually work → Irrelevant to the moment when that data is needed Good BI isn’t just about surfacing metrics. It needs to deliver the right insight, to the right person, at the right time, in a way they can act on. If your dashboards aren’t being used, ask yourself: ⤷ Does the data answer a specific business question? ⤷ Is the metric definition clear and trusted across teams? ⤷ Is the dashboard part of the daily workflow? ⤷ Does it actually support a decision or just display numbers? Fixing this starts with shifting your mindset: You’re not building a dashboard. You’re building a decision support system. That means thinking beyond visuals. Solving for adoption, not just output. And treating dashboards like products with users, value, and iteration cycles. If you're seeing adoption plateau or drop, you're not facing a tooling problem. You're facing a relevance problem. Solve for that, and adoption takes care of itself. #BusinessIntelligence #DataStrategy

Let's stop treating bad adoption as a product problem 🤦♂️ It's a problem with DEMONSTRATING VALUE. And it might be silently killing your growth. Your product team is building amazing features. But they can't force users to embrace them. Adoption is the ultimate cross-functional challenge. When marketing positions the product one way... When sales sets different expectations... When customer success struggles to demonstrate value... When product builds features without clear use cases... Users fall through the cracks, and adoption suffers. Here are eight things that CAN really move the needle on adoption: 🟢 **Demonstrating value early and clearly.** I've seen adoption rates vary from 40% to 85% based on how quickly users experience their "aha moment." Don't bury your value proposition under complex features or lengthy setup processes. 🟢 **Not overwhelming users on day one.** Start smaller, introduce core features first, and you'll be setting the stage for broader adoption opportunities in the future. Each new feature should solve a clear problem for the user. 🟢 **Moving from feature-focused to outcome-focused demos.** One company spent months trying to improve adoption by showcasing every feature. The most important lever was shifting to demonstrations that showed outcomes that users actually cared about. 🟢 **Educating beyond the initial onboarding.** Users need to know about new features, learn best practices, and feel connected to a bigger community. They also need to grok why it's worth investing time in the product so they can defend the business value to leadership. 🟢 **Nailing contextual guidance.** Seeing value in the right context is critical for a user staying engaged. Don't make users hunt for help or figure things out on their own—bring information to them when and where they need it. 🟢 **Integrations, integrations, integrations.** The more your product is embedded in a customer's workflow and systems of record, the more likely they'll adopt it fully. There are three aspects to this: connected data, streamlined workflows, and expanded use cases. 🟢 **Broadening the use cases for your product.** The more problems you solve for your customer, the more champions you'll have. Expanding horizontally within an organization builds resilience against churn. 🟢 **Measuring the right adoption indicators.** Do you know what features are predictive of long-term success? Focus on tracking meaningful engagement, not vanity metrics. The companies that win don't silo adoption responsibility—they make it everyone's mission. #productadoption #customersuccess #productmanagement #saas

Even when you think something is easy to use, like a chatbot, adoption doesn't happen by accident. Adoption is success you need to plan for, and you need a strategy around it. The strategy I use is called the 3 E's: Education, Engagement, and Execution 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 should be your first adoption planning step, and it should also continue to run throughout the project. A lot of people don't think about education as related to driving engagement, but it's critical. If people don't know 𝐰𝐡𝐲 it makes sense for them to start working in new ways, they have no motivation to do so. Operating in the dark is scary, a compounded feeling since change is already scary. If your adoption program starts with training at the end of a project, you've already failed. 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 is the next step, and it's multi-stage. Engaging end users in every step of the project is vital. Understand their needs by listening to them, engage them in process improvement, engage them in pilots and iterative roll-outs, engage them through training. This project is for them and they should be involved so that by the time roll-out approaches, they're excited about it! It should not come as a surprise to them that there's a new platform for them to use, or what the platform is - they should be eagerly awaiting it and feel ownership already. 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 is the final step. As you roll-out and train, you'll need to capture pockets of success and amplify them. Put channels in place and ensure cross-pollination so that peer-to-peer word of mouth can spread. Capture metrics and tell everyone, capture quotes of success and happy use and spread these. This is a human-centered adoption program with enough flexibility to suit any environment and any project. Because adoption is all about your people: success means you've met their needs. They need to be at the center of your project the whole way through. #changemanagement #adoption #legaltech #AI