Involve the User Community Early, Including Your Detractors

"There's no way that if you get participation out of a person can they say you didn't rock it." ~Jam Master Jay
Many organizations feel that the best time to begin engaging the end-user community is during the pre-rollout testing phase of a project. While this is an important time to be talking with the user community, hopefully you are engaging them far earlier than this. Otherwise, you are at serious risk of adversely affecting their processes/workflows.

Communicating Change to Your Environment Effectively

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts." ~Arnold Bennett
Some of the biggest mistakes I have made as a professional have centered around insufficiently communicating change and its effects to the user community of the project I was working on. If you look at the statistics from IT Cortex, I am hardly alone. They cite a full 57% of the survey respondents listed bad communications as the top reason for project failure. If that is the case, what can we do the help ensure that we don't fall into the same traps again? IT can be summed up in two simple words that have big consequences: Empathy and Participation