That spreadsheet is the most honest feedback the programme will ever receive. It records, cell by cell, what the new system does not yet do for her. Most programmes never read it, because they are measuring something else.
What the green dashboard is counting
Logins and training completions measure attendance. They tell a sponsor that people turned up, and nothing about whether the work moved.
The evidence that the human side shapes the outcome is strong. Prosci's Best Practices in Change Management, 12th Edition, a 2023 study of 2,668 respondents in 101 countries, found that 88% of respondents with excellent change management met or exceeded their project objectives. With poor change management, 13% did.
A sevenfold difference deserves better instruments than a course register. The instruments are poor because of the belief beneath them: that adoption is something done to people once the system is finished. Adoption is a property of the design. Three shifts follow from taking that seriously.
From courses completed to workarounds retired
Nobody keeps a second set of records for pleasure. A person maintains a spreadsheet beside the system because the system cannot hold a customer's odd payment terms, or because the report arrives a day after the meeting it is needed for. The workaround is where the design stopped and the person carried on.
So count workarounds. Before go-live, ask each team to list the spreadsheets, side emails and paper notes the old process depended on, and add the new ones that appear in the first weeks. Each line has an owner and a reason. Each line that closes is adoption you can prove.
Count exceptions the same way. When an unusual order or a disputed invoice arrives, it is either handled inside the system or handled around it. The share handled inside is a number a board can read.
From resistance as attitude to resistance as design information
Programmes speak of "resistors" as if reluctance were a temperament. People resist specific things: a screen that takes longer than the one it replaced, or a log of their every action that nobody has explained.
Germany gives that last worry a formal channel. Under section 87 of the Works Constitution Act, the works council has a right of co-determination over the introduction and use of technical devices designed to monitor employees' behaviour or performance. A system that records who did what, and when, is exactly what a works council expects to negotiate.
Leaders elsewhere tend to see delay. I see a design review by the people who will use the thing, held before the build is finished. An organisation with no such law can still hold the meeting. The objections raised there will be raised anyway, later, in the form of a spreadsheet.
From go-live as the finish to day 90 as the first reading
Go-live proves the system works. It cannot prove that people work in it, because in the first weeks everyone is supervised and supported. By day 90 the floor-walkers have gone and the habits that remain are the real ones.
Two measures belong at day 90. One is the question log: what people ask the support desk and each other. Volume matters less than which questions have stopped, because a question nobody asks any more has been answered by the design.
The other is the new joiner. Time how long a recruit takes to complete one real task unaided: raise a purchase order, say, or release a payment. In the UAE this is a pressing measure. A Cabinet decision requires private sector establishments with 50 or more employees to raise Emiratisation in skilled jobs by 2 per cent a year, reaching 10 per cent by 2026. An employer under that rule has a steady flow of nationals arriving in skilled roles, each meeting the system with no memory of the old one, and their first unaided task is the cleanest test the design will get.
The sponsor who counts what is no longer there
Picture the day-90 review as I expect good programmes to run it. There is no slide deck. The sponsor spends the morning on the floor with a single page: the workaround list drawn up before go-live.
At the planner's desk the second monitor now shows the system's own exception queue, and "actuals_real_v7" was archived in week six. In accounts payable, the tray where disputed invoices used to wait for a phone call is empty. A graduate who joined three weeks ago releases a payment run while the sponsor watches, and asks nobody for help.
Four lines on the page are still open. Each one goes back to the design team that afternoon as a change request, with the name of the person who kept the workaround and the reason she gave.
Start the list before the next go-live
This quarter, choose one system already live and ask a single team to show you every spreadsheet, note and side channel they keep beside it. Write down the reason for each, without judgement, and give every line an owner.
If you would like that list drawn up across a whole programme, a transformation diagnostic will begin exactly where your people do: at the desk, with what they still keep open.