Shadow workflows are quietly holding your adoption numbers up
Adoption reporting after go-live measures use of the new system. It does not measure retirement of the old one. Those are different questions and only the second one tells you whether anything changed.
The spreadsheet did not die
People are conscientious. When a new workflow is slower, or less trusted, or simply unfamiliar under deadline, the rational response is to do both: enter the record in the new system and keep the real work in the old one. Usage goes up. Nothing has changed.
This is not resistance and it is not a training problem. It is a design signal. A parallel process persists because the new path has a gap in it, and the people running it found the gap first.
What to instrument instead
AIP-3 measures whether the prior path was retired, which is a different question from whether the new one is used. AIP-6 instruments the behavioural signal that says whether the new path is carrying real decisions or ceremonial ones.
Together they answer the question adoption dashboards cannot: is the work happening here now, or is it happening somewhere we stopped looking.
Usage is an activity measure. Retirement is an evidence measure. Only one of them is hard to fake.
The practical test is unglamorous. Ask what would break if the old system were switched off on Friday. If nobody can answer, it is still carrying load.
The absorption ceiling nobody scores
Concurrent initiatives draw on the same finite capacity, and no single programme can see the total draw. The ceiling is real, it is measurable, and almost nobody measures it.
Nobody can prove it worked, and that was decided at the start
The inability to demonstrate return is not a reporting failure discovered at the end. It is a design decision taken in the first ninety days, when the value case was written in a form that could never be tested.
Your governance was accurate once, on the day it was written
Governance does not fail loudly. It is correct at publication and degrades from that moment, while the document keeps looking authoritative because documents always do.
Start with the free diagnostic
Ten questions, an indicative readiness band, and one prescribed next step. Returned on screen, no call required.
See what it measures