Journal
Why a six-week adoption check beats waiting for the annual review
Annual platform reviews arrive too late to rescue a weak rollout. A short check at six weeks surfaces training gaps while people still remember the launch.
By the annual review, habits have already set. Power users have built workarounds; skeptics have returned to spreadsheets; license counts have been inflated to cover uncertainty. A six-week adoption check interrupts that drift while the launch narrative is still fresh.
We look at three cohorts: intended daily users, intended weekly users, and support roles. Comparing their activity against the launch plan usually reveals one of three patterns — uneven training coverage, missing upstream data that makes the application feel empty, or a process that still routes work through the old tool.
Interviews matter as much as charts. Non-adopters rarely say they dislike the application; they describe friction: unclear ownership of master data, duplicate entry, or a manager who still accepts the old file format. Those details become the action list for the next sprint of change management.
Keep the deliverable short. A two-page brief with cohort tables and five concrete follow-ups is more usable than a forty-slide deck that arrives after the program team has moved on.