AI Governance and Adoption: Why Policy Without Capability Fails
The AI policy is fourteen pages. It was drafted by legal, reviewed by risk, approved by the executive committee and published to the intranet with a mandatory read-and-acknowledge. Ninety-four per cent of staff have acknowledged it. Roughly none could tell you what it permits them to do with a customer email, which is the only […]
Why AI Pilots Succeed and AI Rollouts Fail
The pilot was a clear success. Twelve people in one team, six weeks, a 40 per cent reduction in drafting time and enthusiastic feedback. The business case was approved on the strength of it. Nine months later the same capability is available to 1,400 people, adoption has plateaued somewhere around a third, and nobody can […]
Business 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 […]
Go/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 […]
Business 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 […]
How 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 […]
How to Tell Whether Adoption Actually Caused the Benefit
The slide says two things. Adoption reached 82%. Order-to-cash cycle time fell 19%. Both numbers are true. Between them sits an arrow that nobody has examined, and the arrow is the entire claim. When a CFO asks whether the improvement was actually caused by the change programme, the honest answer in most organisations is that […]
Hypercare Is Not Adoption: What Leaders Still Need to Track
Hypercare ends on a Friday. The war room is stood down, the daily call is cancelled, the tracker is archived, and the project team demobilises over the following fortnight. Somebody sends a thank-you email. Six months later the business case is short and nobody can say exactly when it went wrong — because measurement stopped […]
Why Local Process Owners Matter More Than Communication Cascades
The communication plan is complete. Town halls delivered, cascade packs issued, intranet updated, 94% reach reported. The comms workstream is green. And the finance team in Spain still does not know what to do with consignment stock, because the new process does not describe their case and nobody can tell them whether the local variation […]
Manager Readiness: What Line Managers Need Before Go-Live
Three weeks before go-live, line managers receive a cascade pack. Twelve slides, a set of key messages, and a request to brief their teams by Friday. They are the group most responsible for whether the change holds, and the group told about it last. They are expected to answer questions they have not been briefed […]