Adoption is not a training problem you solve after launch. It is a design constraint from day one.
A tool nobody opens returns nothing, no matter how well it was built. This is the least surprising sentence in software and it is still the most common way a good build ends up worthless.
Resistance is information
When a coordinator quietly keeps using the spreadsheet, that is not stubbornness. It is usually a signal that the new thing is slower for the case they handle forty times a day, or that it asks for information they do not have at the moment they are asked for it.
Which is why the people doing the work get interviewed before anything is designed, and why an all-hands happens at the start of an audit rather than at the end. If a team spends two weeks assuming the exercise is about cutting their jobs, the answers get worse and so does everything built on them.
Forty-five days, not an afternoon
Adoption gets its own program rather than a handover session, because a habit takes longer to change than a login takes to issue. The measure of success is not attendance. It is whether the old workaround has stopped.
Photograph: Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels
