Measure adoption by process compliance and management use, not logins
Logins measure access. Adoption is measured by whether work moves through the intended process, whether decisions are made from system evidence and whether the parallel way of working has gone—each signal with an owner and an action.
Independently created. Contains no employer or client implementation detail, internal names or figures.
01Context
A CRM rollout reported adoption as weekly active users per country. The chart rose steadily. Meanwhile managers still ran reviews from exports, updates clustered the evening before each meeting, and one subsidiary kept its own tracker. The adoption report was green while the operating model stayed offline.
02Decision drivers
- D01
Access and use can be ceremonial
- D02
Management behaviour decides what people keep doing
- D03
Signals must lead to an action, not only a chart
- D04
Units must be comparable without ignoring local context
03Options considered
Logins and active users
Licence management
Cost: Green reports while the business runs elsewhereField completeness
Data-entry audits
Cost: Rewards placeholder dataAn adoption ladder with owned signals per level
Any process meant to change how people work
Cost: Signals to define, owners to name and a review cadence04Decision
Measure adoption on six levels—access, usage, process compliance, management adoption, operating-model adoption and improvement—and report the highest level each unit has reached. Define each signal with an owner, what it means and the action it triggers; set no universal thresholds, and read differences between units with local context. Review the signals in a monthly adoption forum that can decide.
05Consequences
- Login counts remain, as the lowest level, not as the headline.
- Management use becomes visible—and a leadership responsibility.
- Bypass behaviour is measured, so parallel tools cannot quietly return.
- Every signal has someone who acts on it.
06Revisit when
The process is fully system-enforced and cannot be bypassed.
Usage is the only behaviour that matters, as in a pure self-service tool.
07Where this decision is applied
Cases that take this decision, and why it matters there.
- Adoption case / 01Moving a commercial team from parallel trackers to CRMA team with a CRM that still manages from spreadsheets: each tracker inventoried and classified, its legitimate value moved into the operating model, the management cadence moved into the CRM, and a dated freeze—with bypass signals afterwards.
- Adoption case / 02Designing adoption for a multi-subsidiary CRM rolloutA global CRM deployed across subsidiaries with different maturity, roles, data quality, local tools and management habits: readiness assessed per unit, waves sequenced by readiness, enablement by role, champions with time, and adoption compared by level in local context.
- Adoption case / 05Replacing mandatory fields with data people useA CRM full of complete but meaningless data: each field audited for who enters it, who uses it and which decision it feeds—then removed, derived, prefilled, made conditional or kept, with value returned to the person entering it.
- Adoption case / 06Keeping adoption owned after the project team leavesA rollout that ended at go-live: responsibilities handed from project roles to named operating owners, a friction register feeding one governed backlog, a release cadence, and adoption signals reviewed on a schedule—so the design keeps improving.