The episode, in writing
The pattern every executive recognizes
A company commits millions. The program team works for eighteen months, sometimes two years. Go-live day arrives: applause, handshakes, the system declared a success. Six months later, adoption has stalled, old spreadsheets are quietly back, manual workarounds have crept in — and the business case nobody talks about anymore is quietly dying. As Ram Narayanan puts it: Go-live is a milestone. Value is a behavior.
The missing layer: people-and-adoption as a discipline
Most ERP programs have change management on paper. What is missing is people-and-adoption treated as a discipline, not a support activity: (1) readiness before milestones, (2) role-based capability diagnosis, (3) manager enablement, (4) adoption-to-value measurement. The vendor measures readiness to go live. Somebody has to measure readiness to sustain value.
Why workarounds return
Training teaches which buttons to press; it does not build conviction. A McKinsey global survey found transformations fostering understanding and conviction are 3.2x more likely to outperform peers. The rule: you would never go live without system integration testing — so why go live without adoption readiness testing?
Measure people signals, not milestones
Dashboards must report stakeholder confidence and commitment by group, purchase orders actually raised in the system, manual workarounds declining week by week. Benefits are adoption-gated.
Diagnose before you invest
The system is not the investment. Adoption is the investment. Run an independent readiness diagnostic — role by role, manager by manager — before committing further spend. That is what CHANGEReadyX™ was built to do.
Ram Narayanan is the Architect of CHANGEReadyX™ and Founder of TAPAS Advisory, with 25+ years of enterprise HR, OD, capability and transformation experience (Viatris, Johnson & Johnson, Merck).