DAP Professional Spotlight: Jeff McMillan

I’d like to introduce you to Project Coordinator of Business Transformation at Minto Group, Jeffrey McMillan, a.k.a Jeff, the Certified Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) Professional.

What makes him a certified DAP Professional, you ask?

Not only is Jeff empowering his colleagues at Minto Group to be self-sufficient on a daily basis, but he also completed a certification course at WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Institute that took his strategic offering to the next level.

There are over 1000 employees at Minto Group across North America and, during the pandemic, the organization made the shift to remote work—meaning Jeff and his team now have to carry the responsibility of driving employee software engagement and adoption from a distance.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff to learn about his experience with the DAP Institute as well as the impact it is making on his career and Minto Group as a whole.

1. How did you become a DAP professional and what challenges were your company facing that led to the creation of the DAP role?

Jeff: We were looking for a solution to help with training and onboarding staff to our new ERP. We are replacing SAP with several new ERP applications that are both cloud-based and desktop-based. Our users are consistently looking for training. Manuals and how-to guides were routinely out of date and most users were using out-of-date training materials. Now working from home, these issues grew. In the office, staff can ask fellow staff for help. While working from home, it becomes harder and more time consuming to arrange time to provide help. We needed a solution to provide in-the-moment training opportunities.

2. How is DAP used at your company?

Jeff: We have recently rolled out WalkMe on our internal tools and intranet site as the first phase of our WalkMe rollout. Our project team is in the process of determining processes and training materials for our new ERP systems. While they finalize these details, we are introducing our staff to WalkMe on our existing web tools to get them “hooked” on WalkMe before the other ERP applications go-live. We are also working on developing our WalkMe Workstation strategy that will tie in all our ERP applications into one experience for our staff.

3. What have been the greatest successes in implementation and DAP usage at your company?

Jeff: Employee empowerment! All the initial feedback on WalkMe from our staff has been so positive. Staff are excited and happy to use WalkMe. They know where to find help right away which helps them feel empowered. Happy employees make change management easier. The other great win for us is the WalkMe Insights. We have never had so much data available to our Business Transformation and Training teams. Prior to WalkMe a lot of assumptions were made, now we are using real data to drive our business process decisions.

4. What is your experience with the certification course in the Digital Adoption Institute? What motivated you to take the course?

Jeff: The Digital Adoption Institute is a great resource. It was great to get hands on experience building WalkMe content. It was also great to learn project management skills to help keep my WalkMe intake process more organized. I was lucky enough to win enrollment into the Digital Adoption Solution Engineer course. This advanced course was a hybrid of online learning, and online lecture/teamwork exercise. I met several other WalkMe digital adoption professionals (and customers) during the course. We were able to bounce ideas off each other and ask for advice. Those connections and lessons learned have be invaluable to our successful rollout and gets you thinking outside of the box.

5. How has becoming a certified DAP professional changed your professional trajectory? How it impacted your life?

Jeff: “Digital Adoption” is a new term at our company. Becoming a certified DAP professional has helped by providing me a toolkit to use to educate our company on what digital adoption is and the value it brings. I have a found a home in DAP. Before I was looking into ways to interlink my love of project management, training, and empowering end users. As a Digital Adoption Professional, I do just that and more!

6. What advice would you give someone looking to become a certified DAP professional through a course in the Institute?

Jeff: Be open-minded, think outside of the box and make connections with other DAP pros. During the online classroom sessions I would routinely bring a challenge I was having to the meeting. By the end of the meeting, I had several solutions to try out! jQuery may look scary, but it will be your best friend!

7. Are you learning a lot on the job? How often are you enriching your DAP knowledge?

Jeff: For me, learning will never stop. Technology is constantly changing and so are the requirements from our end users. It is important for me to learn what challenges our staff face, and learn new techniques, tools or systems to help them.