The First 30 Days Problem

Week one of a new system always looks good. Not because the implementation was good but because the conditions that make implementations work are artificially present. The project manager is still on site. The implementation team is a Slack message away. Everyone is paying attention. Adoption numbers come back strong. The implementation team packs up.

Week two is when the real test starts. It is also when nobody is watching.

I have been on the customer success side of this enough times to know what week three looks like. Support tickets start. Not about bugs but about things that are not in any documentation. "Who approves exceptions for transactions over this threshold?" "What do we do when a customer says they already paid but it is not showing?" These questions have answers. During implementation, those answers existed in conversations between the project manager and the power users. Nobody wrote them down.

There is always one person who understood the edge cases during go-live. She knew which customers had legacy arrangements, why the late-payment workflow had a three-day grace period. She is now three weeks into a different project. When she gets the call, she helps from memory, but half the context is lost.

Then the workarounds start. Someone discovers they can sidestep a broken approval flow by re-entering the record from scratch. They teach it to the next person. By month two, the team has a stable set of workarounds that nobody planned and everyone treats as normal operation.

The adoption metric, meanwhile, looks fine. Logins per day, sessions per user. None of these surface the workarounds. None show that the reconciliation team stopped using the new module in week four and went back to the spreadsheet.

Good 30-day management: a standing weekly call in weeks two through six for questions, not status updates. Decisions get written down. Power users from go-live stay accessible until workaround patterns stabilize. The first audit happens at day thirty, not ninety. A short, honest conversation with the people using the system daily: what are you not using, what did you stop doing because it was too hard.