The hidden cost of success: Why great projects still fail at adoption

Change is inevitable, but for organisations that want to survive and thrive, it is also essential. Research by Boston Consulting Group found that the cost of failure for a typical large company can exceed £17 million annually for a single large-scale technology programme, with more than two-thirds of these programmes failing to be delivered on time, within budget, or within scope1.

Projects implement change to bridge the gap between how things work today (the current state) and how they need to work in the future (the desired future state). Consider a project team that has invested months of hard work, long hours and unwavering commitment to deliver the best possible outcome. Yet six months later, the project’s outputs sit largely untouched, with few people making use of what was delivered. Organisations have become very good at measuring delivery and milestone success, but far less effective at measuring whether change has truly taken root. The result is a costly gap between implementation and adoption.

How we measure success

There are many traditional project metrics that help us measure whether a project was ‘delivered’. These include delivery on time, within budget and within the agreed scope. What these metrics fail to cover is whether or not the change was embraced and if it made a difference to how things are done day to day. For example, a project to implement a new digital service can be launched successfully, but if staff continue using old workarounds, spreadsheets, or manual processes, the intended benefits are not fully realised. While the delivery may have been successful, the change has failed.

Why adoption is harder than delivery

There are two groups within projects; those responsible for the deployment of the project, and those responsible for business as usual (BAU). Transition from project to adoption is the passing of responsibility for the project deliverables from one to the other through carefully managed governance. This is the transition from problem to solution.

BAU teams come with established ways of working, culture, preferences history and experience. The project should consider these experiences and established working practices when shaping the change message; otherwise, it is more likely to encounter resistance or reduced adoption.

Once delivered, there are a number of questions the BAU team will naturally ask, to help create understanding of the change. Projects that have considered these questions are positing themselves in a positive way for the BAU team to adopt the change. Some of those questions include:

Why should I do this differently?
What's in it for me?
Will this make my job harder?
Do I trust the new approach?

BAU teams have plenty of other things on their to do list, as well as needing to consider staff absence or vacancies, existing workloads or multiple change initiatives landing at the same time. Projects need to stand out and get noticed amongst everything else, or risk just fizzling out and ending up as just a dusty file on a shelf.

The hidden cost of poor adoption

In the business case, there will be benefits that the project should achieve. These may include efficiency gains, reduction of costs, improved user experience or improved data. If ways of working don't change, if people carry on doing what they have always done and don’t embed the new world that the project aimed to create, these benefits will have a high risk of not being realised. This can have wider implications than just the project being delivered.

Failure to embed change can result in long-term reputational damage and make employees less willing to support future change initiatives, particularly if they have seen previous projects launched with great fanfare only to disappear without trace.

Organisations that fail to embed change often require additional training, support teams and service enhancements, increasing both expenditure and operational effort. A stronger adoption approach and plan would have reduced these costs.

Adoption should not be an afterthought

Activities to ensure successful adoption should start long before the transition point and approaches to support more successful adoption could include involving end users in design and testing. This will help shape deliverables that will land well, while drawing on respected operational colleagues who have built the credibility and confidence needed to secure wider support. Attendance at a training session should not be mistaken for readiness to adopt change. People may understand a new process yet still revert to familiar ways of working. This raises an important question: how can organisations determine whether change has truly taken hold?

Rather than focusing on training attendance, organisations should ask a more meaningful set of questions: are people using the new process or tool introduced by the project? Are old ways of working disappearing? And are the intended benefits being realised? This represents a shift from measuring activity to measuring behaviour and outcomes. Which is why go-live should be viewed as the starting line for adoption, not the finish line for delivery.

What successful projects do differently

Successful projects prioritise user adoption as highly as technical delivery. This extends beyond implementing the solution itself and requires working closely with business-as-usual (BAU) teams to help them understand, adapt to and succeed in their new environment. Engaging with users after go-live provides valuable insight into how the change is being experienced in practice and helps project teams identify barriers to adoption.

By taking corrective action where needed, projects can better support BAU teams in adopting and embedding change as part of their day-to-day ways of working. This helps keep benefits realisation on track, rather than assuming people will naturally embrace new processes once they have been implemented. In doing so, measurement moves beyond implementation activity and focuses instead on real-world outcomes, including the extent to which the intended benefits are being realised.

Closing thought

The most dangerous project status is not marked on the delivery confidence report as "red". It's a project that is marked green, closed successfully and quietly fails to change anything. Delivery creates the opportunity for improvement, but adoption is what turns that opportunity into reality. Organisations don't realise benefits from projects they launch; they realise benefits from changes people actually use.