Rolling it out isn't adopting it

The tool is installed, the training has happened, the memo has gone out. Six months later half the teams are back to their old habits, and the parallel spreadsheets have reappeared. The project is officially finished; it has changed nothing.

This is the most common way to lose money on a transformation, and the least visible: the budget was spent, the milestones were met, the project indicators are all green. The only thing missing is the usage.

Why the old habits come back

Rarely because of resistance to change: that explanation suits everybody and explains nothing. Usually there are three concrete reasons.

• The new way of working is slower in the first few weeks. Nobody budgeted for that extra cost, so people go back to what works.
• A real case was never dealt with. The tool covers 90% of situations; the remaining 10% are precisely the ones that matter, and they force a workaround.
• Nothing measures usage. What is not watched is not sustained, in a transformation as anywhere else.

What actually makes the difference

• Measure real usage, not the number of people trained. How many log in, how many cases genuinely go through the new route.
• Go and find the people working around the system, and listen to why. They almost always have a good reason, and it points straight at a design flaw.
• Test with short pilots before going wide, so those cases surface while they are still cheap.
• Anchor it in the routine: if the subject is not on the agenda of a regular meeting, it disappears.
• Involve the people who will use it from the design stage onwards. This is not a social nicety, it is what prevents the forgotten 10%.

A transformation has succeeded when the new practices have become the ordinary ones, and nobody calls them new any more.