Shadow AI: What Unsanctioned Tool Use Tells You About Readiness
A security review finds forty unsanctioned AI tools in use across the business. Marketing is running copy through one model, finance is summarising contracts in another, three teams are paying for the same product on personal cards, and somebody in HR has been drafting performance feedback in a chatbot. The meeting that follows asks one […]
Read articleBusiness Readiness Criteria: How to Define “Ready” So It Cannot Be Fudged
Here is a business readiness criterion, taken almost verbatim from a real programme: 95% of impacted users have completed training. It looks rigorous. It has a number, a population and a verb. It will be reported as met, because it is designed to be met — and it permits a state of the world in […]
Read articleWhat a Day-1 Support Model Should Look Like — and Who Staffs It
Ask a programme what its day-one support model is, six weeks out, and the answer is usually some version of this: there is a mailbox, the super users will help their teams, and the project team will be around for the first two weeks. None of that is a model. It is a hope, expressed […]
Read articleParallel Running: When to Keep the Legacy System On, and For How Long
The plan said four weeks of parallel running. Finance would key the critical transactions into both systems, reconcile daily, and switch the legacy system off at the end of the first month. Fourteen months later the legacy system is still on. Two people are still keying into both. Nobody has formally decided to continue — […]
Read articleHow to Run a Cutover Rehearsal That Tests People, Not Just Systems
Most ERP programmes rehearse their cutover two or three times. Almost all of those rehearsals test the same thing: whether the technical runbook completes inside the weekend window. That is a real and necessary test. Extracts run, loads complete, reconciliations balance, the sequence holds, and the team learns that step 47 takes ninety minutes rather […]
Read articleGo/No-Go Decisions: The Evidence a Steering Committee Actually Needs
The go/no-go pack has thirty slides. Twenty-six of them describe what has been finished. Testing complete. Data migrated. Training delivered to 96 per cent. Cutover plan approved. Command centre stood up. Each slide is accurate, each was expensive to produce, and together they answer a question nobody in the room needs answered: how much of […]
Read articleBusiness Readiness vs Technical Readiness: Who Signs Off What Before Go-Live
Two weeks before go-live, a steering committee is shown a slide with a lot of green on it. Defect counts are inside tolerance. The final data migration reconciled. Interfaces passed end-to-end testing. Performance testing held at twice expected volume. The recommendation is to proceed, and the committee proceeds. Six weeks later the same committee is […]
Read articleHow to Assess Change Saturation Before ERP, CRM or AI Rollout
The rollout is approved. The date is set, the budget is committed, the vendor is engaged. Nobody has asked whether the teams receiving it can absorb another change this year, because that question is normally asked much later — after adoption disappoints, as a diagnosis. Asked before the decision, it changes the decision: what gets […]
Read articleHow to Run a Change Impact Assessment Before Go-Live
Most change impact assessments are run too late, by too few people, at the wrong depth — and produce a document rather than a decision. The individual techniques are well covered. What is usually missing is the process around them: when to start, how wide to go, who needs to be in the room, how […]
Read articleHow to Know Whether a Transformation Is Truly Embedded
A year after go-live, somebody asks whether the change has really stuck. The usual answer is a shrug backed by a usage figure. People are in the system, the numbers look acceptable, nothing has blown up. That is offered as evidence of embeddedness because no one has a test for it — “embedded” is used […]
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