The System Is Live. So Why Is Nobody Using It?
By Shannan Robillard, OCM Practice Lead
I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count.
The configuration is clean. Data migration went fine. Go-live happened, everyone clapped, and the project was declared a success.
Six months later, half the team is back on spreadsheets. The managers who were “supportive” during the project have quietly stopped reinforcing the new process. The ROI that was sold to leadership? Nowhere.
That’s not a technology problem. Nobody managed the people through the change, so the change didn’t stick.
The Research Has Been Clear for 20 Years. We Keep Ignoring It.
BCG, McKinsey, and Prosci have all landed at the same number: 70% of digital transformations fail at the people layer. Organizations with strong change management are seven times more likely to meet their project objectives.
Seven times. That should stop a room.
It doesn’t, because the same organizations that read the research still cut OCM when scope tightens. Or add it as a line item after go-live when adoption numbers come in bad. Or hand it off to whoever has bandwidth.
I get why. It’s harder to point to than a configured workflow or a migrated dataset. But everyone who has been through an implementation has seen the same signs. They always look the same.
What the Risk Actually Sounds Like in Discovery
Before any engagement gets moving, there are signals that tell you exactly how much people-side risk is sitting in front of you. Most show up early, if you are listening.
You are replacing something your team has used for 10-plus years. That is not a learning curve. It is muscle memory and professional identity wrapped up in a system. Resistance will be real, and it usually will not be rational. Plan for it anyway.
It is a cross-functional rollout. The moment you are crossing department lines, you are in the middle of politics. Every team has its own history, its own priorities, and its own definition of what counts.
Someone says, “It didn’t take last time.” This is actually an opening. Your team already knows change is not sticking. They just do not know what options exist to make this time different. That is a conversation worth having.
Your project team is thin. When you are leaning on your implementation partner for everything, there is no one internally managing the human side of the change. That does not disappear. It becomes your problem at go-live if it was not addressed during the project.
You have just been through a reorg, merger, or leadership change. Change fatigue is cumulative. Employees who have already been through disruption have a lower tolerance for more of it. The rollout has to account for that reality.
Field or floor-based workers are in scope. These are not desk workers who will sit through a two-hour training on a Tuesday morning. Their relationship with new technology, and the time available to learn it, is completely different. Training built for an office will not land on a floor.
Nobody has asked how users feel. When I hear this, I know go-live is going to be a surprise, and not a good one. If no one has assessed readiness, no one knows what is actually coming.
Any one of these is a flag. More than one, and OCM is not optional. It is what determines whether this project delivers.
What We Actually Do
You might bring us in at kickoff. Or mid-project when adoption is already at risk. Or you have your own OCM or L&D team and need a partner who can work alongside you. The starting point does not change the goal: successful adoption and long-term success with the platform.
We build programs around how your specific workforce learns, what your culture can absorb, and what the real barriers to adoption are for your users, not users in general. In practice, that covers three things.
1. Figure Out Who Is Actually Affected, and How.
Before any materials are built, we need a clear picture of who is affected, in what ways, and what they are walking into this with. Stakeholder analysis, change impact assessment, and honest conversations about what has worked and failed in your organization before. That output shapes everything downstream: what to communicate, to whom, when, and how to train people who may have zero prior Salesforce experience, or who work in the field and cannot spare two hours on a Tuesday.
2. Keep People Informed Throughout, Not Just the Week Before Go-Live.
When employees do not hear anything, they assume the worst. A communication plan grounded in what is actually being built, not generic corporate-change language, keeps people oriented instead of anxious. Managers get their own version: a toolkit that tells them what is coming, what their team will ask, and how to answer it. A manager who does not know the answers will say nothing, or say the wrong thing. Either one compounds resistance.
3. Train for the Job. Then Stay Through Go-Live and Beyond.
Generic training tells your workforce that leadership does not understand what they actually do. We build role-based materials using annotated screenshots from the real system, designed around how your specific workforce learns. Go-live is not the finish line. The sustainment model is what determines whether adoption holds at month six. That is the piece most implementations skip, and the one most organizations wish they had not.
Closing the Post-Go-Live Gap with Agentforce
One of the most persistent problems in any implementation is the gap between training and the moment someone actually needs to use the system. You can run the best training program in the world, and three weeks after go-live, someone is still stuck because they cannot remember how a specific workflow works in their context.
We have built a solution for that.
Using Agentforce and the actual Jira ticket data from your implementation, including the requirements, decisions, and user stories that describe exactly how your system was built, we deploy a live, AI-powered training and adoption agent built custom to your configuration.
This is not a generic chatbot pointed at Salesforce documentation. It knows your configuration. It knows the specific workflows your team was trained on. It answers “how do I do this in our system,” not “how does Salesforce work in general.” And it is available whenever someone needs it, not just during a training window.
The agent becomes part of your sustainment model: always current, always available, drawing from the actual source of truth for how the system was designed. Adoption does not spike at go-live and decay. It builds.
*This solution is built custom to your implementation and requires AgentForce licenses.
A Word on AI, Since Everyone Is Asking
There is a version of this conversation where someone asks: won’t AI just handle this? Personalized training at scale, automated communications, real-time adoption analytics.
Yes and no.
AI can accelerate content development and surface patterns in adoption data faster than any dashboard. The Agentforce agent we build for organizations is a direct example of that. We use it ourselves.
But AI cannot tell you why your regional director is quietly undermining the rollout in one-on-ones with their team. It cannot build the trust that makes a floor worker willing to try something new on a busy shift. It cannot replace the judgment that comes from sitting in a discovery session, reading the room, and understanding what your organization has already been through.
If anything, AI is raising the stakes. Implementations are moving faster. The gap between what a system can do and what users actually do with it is widening. Organizations deploying AI-powered tools without structured change management are going to feel that gap acutely.
Governance and process alignment matter more now, not less. The technology has never been the hard part.
The Question Is Not Whether Change Management Works
The research has been settled for decades. Seven times more likely to hit your objectives when change management is in place. The only question is whether you invest before go-live, or after, when it costs a lot more.
If you are heading into a Salesforce implementation, or already mid-project and seeing the signals, let’s talk. A 30-minute discovery call is enough to map out what the people side of this engagement actually needs.
About the Authors
Shannan Robillard leads the Organizational Change Management practice at ForeFront, an EPAM company. ForeFront’s OCM offering is built for mid-commercial organizations navigating Salesforce implementations, the ones that need enterprise-level rigor without the enterprise-level overhead.
