Personas can be an important tool that drives adoption and business value realization. What happens quite often is that organizations deploy technology solutions without a full understanding of the users that those solutions are intended for. When this happens, the deployed solutions do not get used, and the value of those solutions goes unrealized.

If an organization deploys an Azure solution, but nobody uses it, the organization doesn’t realize the value – and it becomes a waste.  In order to generate value from an Azure solution, an organization must determine what users should START doing or STOP doing, in order to realize the value of the solution.

Essentially, its user behavior change that becomes the yardstick for evaluation, adoption, and use of solutions deployed in Azure. Personas can be useful when trying to drive adoption of new Azure solutions.

A persona is really just a fictitious character that represents a certain user type. Personas refer to the “who” when discussing an organization. The use of personas helps organizations characterize different sets of users, and to capture details about what a typical day looks like to those users. Personas can be used to capture the pains, needs, and desired outcomes that users have as they perform their daily tasks. 

To build personas that reflect the workforce, organizations need to communicate with end users. Organizations need to know how work currently gets done in order to deploy Azure solutions that help users get that work done. Defining personas for each user type can help organizations accomplish this. More specifically, from an Azure perspective, an organization can build personas to assist with the creation of roles. By defining different personas, the organization has better visibility into what roles are necessary – and if custom roles are needed.

As a result, organizations can realize more value when deploying Azure solutions, because the solutions that are deployed can then be tailored to the users for whom the solutions are intended. Management of those solutions can be streamlined via built-roles that match the defined personas, or via custom roles, when the built-in roles are not sufficient.