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The technology review six months after launch
The most important meeting in any technology project is the one nobody budgets for.
By Phil Kinsley
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The most important meeting in any technology project is the one nobody budgets for.
It is not the vendor demo, the architecture workshop, the executive kickoff, or the go live celebration. It is the meeting that happens six months later when everyone is trying to understand whether the investment actually changed anything.
By that point, the technology is usually working exactly as intended. The licenses have been assigned, the integrations are complete, the dashboards are populated, and the project team has moved on to the next priority. What remains is the much harder challenge of changing how people work, how decisions are made, and who is accountable for outcomes.
Over the course of my career, I have seen this play out repeatedly across cloud migrations, cybersecurity programs, data initiatives, AI deployments, and large scale transformation efforts. Organizations are generally very good at budgeting for technology and implementation services, but they often underestimate the effort required to drive adoption, establish governance, improve processes, and embed new ways of working into the business.
That is where projects either create lasting value or slowly lose momentum.
What many organizations discover is that technology is rarely the reason an initiative falls short of expectations. More often, the challenges come from unclear ownership, competing priorities, limited executive engagement, or the assumption that people and processes will naturally adapt once a new platform has been deployed.
It rarely works that way.
When reviewing a major technology investment, one of the most valuable questions an executive team can ask is what success looks like six months after implementation is complete. Not whether the project was delivered on time or whether the features are functioning as expected, but whether the business is operating differently because of it.
The answer to that question will often tell you far more about the likelihood of success than any business case, architecture diagram, or vendor presentation ever could.
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