How to Use a RAID Log for People Risk, Not Just Delivery Risk
Open almost any programme RAID log and the risks are recognisable: integration complexity, supplier dependency, environment availability, data migration volume, budget contingency. Somewhere near the bottom, in amber, one line reads “User adoption risk — Medium — Owner: Change Manager — Mitigation: comms and training plan in place”. It has said that for eleven months. […]
Read articleUsing a Fishbone Diagram to Diagnose Low Adoption
Adoption problems rarely have one cause. A team using the new system half as much as expected is usually experiencing four things at once, each individually survivable and collectively decisive. That is the situation a fishbone diagram is built for, and it is where sequential questioning falls short — a 5 Whys chain produces one […]
Read articleRoot Cause Analysis for Adoption Problems: 5 Whys in Practice
Six weeks after go-live, order entry is taking roughly twice as long as it did on the legacy system. The steering committee has been told that users need more training. That is a conclusion, not a diagnosis, and it has the useful property of pointing away from anything the programme would have to fix. The […]
Read articleYour First 30 Days as a Change Lead on a Troubled Programme
You have inherited a programme that everyone describes as challenging. The status is amber and has been for four months, two workstream leads have left, and the go-live date has not moved. The instinct is to rebuild the plan. Resist it for a month. A plan built on the same wrong assumptions will be a […]
Read articleWork Instructions and SOPs: Why Nobody Reads Them
The work instruction for goods receipt is fourteen pages. It has a version history, a document owner, an approval table and a change log. It was reviewed by three people and is genuinely accurate. Nobody on the receiving bay has opened it. When someone gets stuck they ask Marek, and when Marek is on leave […]
Read articleWhat Transaction Logs Reveal That Surveys Cannot
A readiness survey asks people what they believe about their own capability. A transaction log records what they did. Both are useful and they answer different questions. Most programmes use only the first, and then wonder why the readiness score and the operational reality diverged. Why self-report has a ceiling Self-report is not unreliable because […]
Read articleDigital Adoption Platforms: What They Fix and What They Hide
A digital adoption platform overlays guidance on top of an application: step-through walkthroughs, tooltips, in-context help, and analytics on what people actually click. They are frequently bought at the point where a programme has realised its training will not be enough, and they are frequently expected to solve a problem they cannot reach. Match the […]
Read articleData Migration Is a People Problem: Ownership, Cleansing and Trust
The migration report is green. 1,284,006 records extracted, 1,284,006 loaded, reconciliation balanced to the record. Three weeks after go-live, a customer service adviser is maintaining her own spreadsheet of delivery addresses, because roughly one in six of the addresses in the system is the invoicing address rather than the delivery one, and she has no […]
Read articleDecommissioning the Legacy System: The Adoption Test You Can’t Fake
Adoption metrics can be argued with. Usage counts can be inflated, survey scores can be flattered, and training completion proves nothing at all. There is exactly one adoption test that cannot be gamed: switch the old system off. If work continues, adoption happened. If it does not, it did not. Which is precisely why so […]
Read articleBenefit Ownership: Why Benefits Die When the Programme Does
The business case listed fourteen benefits. At closure, the programme reported that the capability enabling all fourteen had been delivered, which was true. Two years later nobody can say whether any of them arrived. Not because the answer is bad, but because no one was accountable for finding out, and there was never a baseline […]
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