Built to be Used

The recovery plan was good. Six months later, one of the three fixes has been delivered. The plan was never the problem. By the time an organisation admits an implementation is in trouble, it has usually been in trouble for a year. Each individual difficulty was explained — this site has a leadership problem, that … Read more

Your override rate has fallen from fourteen per cent to three. Before you call that growing confidence, check what it costs somebody to disagree. A model produces a score. A human assessor makes the decision. Human review is the control on which the whole arrangement rests, and it is described that way to the regulator. … Read more

Compliance with the new system is high. The data coming out of it cannot be used. Both are consequences of the same decision. Making use compulsory changes the motivation and nothing else. It does not make a task possible, a design usable, a process workable, or data trustworthy. Where any of those is the obstacle, … Read more

The pilot succeeded. The first rollout site did not come close. Nobody wrote down the difference. A pilot does not run under normal conditions, and the result cannot be extrapolated until somebody has. Project staff on site. Direct access to developers. Defects fixed in forty-eight hours. Reduced caseload targets. Key users released. A general willingness … Read more

Six findings on the same daily task, all correctly classified as low severity. Together they can cost you several full-time equivalents. Severity is assessed per item and experienced in aggregate. No triage process that scores findings separately can see the difference. An extra confirmation step. A field that defaults incorrectly. A list that resets its … Read more

The incident report says ninety minutes, inside the service level, closed. Ask the people who were working that morning. When something goes wrong after go-live, two different things need restoring, and only one of them is usually measured. Technical restoration is the service becoming available again. It is measured in minutes and reported to the … Read more

A user reports a problem in week one and is told it is a known issue. That is the most expensive sentence available at go-live. Most implementations go live with a list of known defects. Most organisations decide not to publish it, on the reasoning that a list of problems would undermine confidence at the … Read more

Your process has five approvals. Pull two years of records and count how many were ever declined. Approvals accumulate in processes and are never removed. Digitising them makes them permanent. That last part is worth pausing on. A step that was a habit becomes a rule the moment it is configured. Removing it afterwards costs … Read more

It tested well. Users scored it highly. In production it takes longer than the system it replaced. That combination is common enough to have its own signature, and it has nothing to do with the interface. Usability asks whether a person can operate this system to perform a task. Workability asks whether the work can … Read more

Your user group has stopped raising anything substantial. They worked out something you did not tell them. Every implementation has three kinds of decision at any moment. Closed ones, taken and not revisitable without a cost the organisation will not accept. Constrained ones, open within limits set by an architecture, a regulation or a product. … Read more