Roll-out strategies

At this point, you have a small team successfully using the new research repository and you have some experience with what makes it easy or hard when it comes to onboarding new team members. The job now is to repeat the process either by inviting more colleagues to the repository or by implementing it in other teams. 

If you haven’t developed all your protocols yet, this is the time to do it. Think about your repository as a self-service product you just launched; even though the systems should be intuitive, you wouldn’t launch a product without its respective documentation. 

The documentation would include the items listed in the Protocols and Governance section plus any other ongoing communication strategy. For example:

• Monthly or quarterly emails to highlight the latest research or collaborations taking place in the repository.
• Ad-hoc message about changes in the taxonomy or protocols (for researchers). 
• Ad-hoc training workshops/internal webinars with new team members being onboarded to the repository.

Your rollout strategy aims to identify a couple of champions within the teams who will be onboarded. These champions are excited about the repository because they experience the pain of not having it and want to see the initiative be successful. 

If the success of the implementation relies heavily on you as a leader then it will be hard to scale. Progressively you should see more and more people contributing and helping others proactively the same way you did at the beginning of the implementation.

Also, make sure your stakeholders are also on the same page. Many of these projects die before they can succeed because different stakeholders at different levels of the org are not aware of the initiative or do not understand the value.