The Role of Strategic Implementation in Successful Collaboration

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) following the COVID-19 pandemic significantly shifted the way businesses and employees interact with toolsets to work to achieve business outcomes. From cross-platform chat to sharing files securely, how people use the right applications with sufficient knowledge to help drive positive results should always be top priority for business leaders.

Successful collaboration begins with implementing a successful strategy at all levels of your organization. When all stakeholders are bought into your strategy, their engagement can increase to all-time highs.

Equip your employees to collaborate well so that they can serve your clients to the best of their ability.

Here are three keys to help guide you so that your collaboration is strategically optimized.

Strategic alignment for better collaboration means many things — primarily, that all team members within your organization clearly understand overarching goals and priorities, allowing them to work together cohesively toward a common vision.

This includes alignment with your sales/presales and engineering teams, for example, getting in front of customers early to hash out strategic planning and ask pointed questions to gain valuable insight and steer your organization in the most profitable direction.

Strategic alignment also involves aligning goals, objectives, resources, processes and activities to support your strategy and avoid pitfalls. Knowing when to implement ad-hoc solutions or begin a pilot program with long-term implications means understanding how all contributions fit into the bigger picture.

Following strategic alignment, you must consider your delivery phase, also known as design, discovery, configuration and implementation. This phase is where ideas become reality and is an important project management process that allows all stakeholders to be involved from the start of a given project’s lifecycle. This includes business owners, design engineers and even contractors working closely together focused on the same goal.

Achieving this goal should equate to adopting a reusable approach that implements the right tools that make the complex simple, whether through automation or a staged migration. If this requires asking your users to change the way they operate with an application, ensure that they have constant access to beneficial resources.

Changing work behavior for stronger business outcomes can be a big lift but it is well worth the effort when done intentionally.

Adoption is one of the last components of your collaboration journey. (And this journey can always continue as new technologies emerge.)

Is your organization using the tools it has strategically invested in? Are your end users properly trained and set up to champion effective communication? Adoption is about educating and enhancing the way people interact with applications and products.

We are creatures of habit, so don’t fear if implementing a new way of working initially feels like a long hike in bad weather. Be prepared to be extra communicative from high-level organizational goals to in-the-weeds specifics on new initiatives and technologies and their impact on individual workloads.

If adoption does not require a major investment, the probability of success is higher. Similarly, I recommend phasing an adoption of a solution to acclimatize specific users before a wider rollout for greater success.

When it comes to tailoring collaboration solutions for organizations across all verticals, CDW’s decades of established partnerships with industry leaders in addition to our team of solutions architects poised to elevate the digital experience are uniquely matched.

A brewing company based in the northcentral United States came to us with the challenge of migrating and integrating many devices. For a year, we worked with them to implement a plan solving for thousands of analog devices as well as call routing. The result was long-term cost savings.

No matter what your business challenge is, we can help you solve it on any timeline and align a solution that boosts your collaboration and gets your organization where it wants to go.