This platform had been the operation director’s call for six months. She had ROI calculations done, vendor references called, and executive buying sign off. I went into her office 3 months after go-live and saw that there was something that told me that her team had their spreadsheets open again.
No one had reported that the trial was unsuccessful. The animals were not subjected to any post-mortem. The software continued to run technologically. But people just had ceased using it, without any drama and as organizations do, they abandoned anything that makes work more difficult than it is.
Based on that moment, I had a new perspective on how SaaS rollouts failure. The platform was really great! There was no lie by the vendor. The issue was one that a purchase order didn’t address and is the issue that has come across dozens of enterprise software projects since then.
The First Mistake Happens Before Anyone Opens a Laptop
The beginning of most SaaS procurement processes are flawed.
Executive experiences a demo. A competitor gets on a platform.A competitor takes place on a platform. Category recommended by a consultant. Now there’s momentum in the organisation in favour of a solution, and the problem that the solution is meant to solve is still defined loosely, until implementation is in progress.
I had a customer who bought a WFM system for a medium sized logistics company as they had heard about such systems at a conference presented by two of their competitors. All internal discussions were about features, a clean dashboard, good API integration and a good reputation for vendor support. A six-months post deployment, in their finance they were still manually approving the invoice the most apparent operational headache throughout. The software worked. Business problem not addressed.
The subject that stops this from happening is actually genuinely basic and also genuinely uncommon Prior to assessing any kind of vendor you ought to be able to create one sentence describing the measurable outcome you anticipate. Not efficiency or workflows “streamlined. Perhaps one of these Decrease the time it takes to get invoices from four days to one day. This particularity keeps the entire process of evaluation on earth. If not, then the decision will be based on feature comparisons and feature comparisons have little to do with whether or not it does anything.
Why does SaaS Rollouts Failure happen so often?
The assumption by the executive is that people are resistant to the new software, which is a training issue.The executive assumption that people do not want the new software, that it is a training issue. More documentation. More workshops. Ore was used to make the walks. An assumption is costly as it does not address the root cause it’s a treatment for the symptom.
One manufacturing client I had implemented a New CRM in his company and when it was introduced, he started holding weekly training sessions for the next couple of months. Leadership felt confident. Conversely, the numbers of uses were different. If I ever had to spend any time with the sales and support staff first hand, it was clear within an hour’s time that how they work the issue. The application of the platform has enabled the addition of 6 Steps to processes which previously only required 2 Steps. Pre-deployment there was no re-engineering of the basic workflows. The software wasn’t so bad. It was merely placed on top of crashed processes and made them more noticeable and certainly more annoying.
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As a rule employees don’t object to change. They resist friction. People find workarounds when they are required to do a familiar tasks in a system made more difficult. These workarounds turn into unofficially established processes. Those unofficial processes generate inconsistencies in data, and it can take months to work out. Change in behaviours and processes is always underestimated by leadership, and software implementation is no exception, as it is always done in the same way according to McKinsey research on organizational transformations.
The Budget Line That Almost Nobody Includes
It is here that finance teams and project managers continually find themselves in trouble.
The cost of licensing is planned for, $5,500.00. Services to implement are planned in the budget. Training is budgeted. Unfortunately, workflow redesign is rarely. It’s workflow redesign where the work of software adoption takes place!
This has been observed in Gartner’s research about the outcomes of digital transformation investments, as well Companies that have viewed technology investment as the crucial factor to be successful with digital transformation tend to perform below par when compared to those that have invested as much in aligning their organizations and changing processes. The numbers on the software contract aren’t a good measure of the cost of rethinking the way 40 people work when a new platform comes along.
I have witnessed this first-hand at a regional health care organization which adopted a patient communication SaaS solution. An economical software budget was adhered to. The hours clinical coordinators, IT and department managers invested in reworking the workflow in their department around the new system never showed up on any project budget. It was an operational time that was supposed to be used for operational activities. That intangible expense it cost more than the initial licensing fee, according to a rough estimate made by the first-year licensing fee.
The strange truth about SaaS Rollouts Failure
The best software does not always win.
I have watched enough enterprise deployments to say this with real conviction. In a B2B services company I worked with a few years ago, we evaluated two project management platforms head to head. One was objectively more capable stronger analytics, deeper third-party integrations, more configuration options, a cleaner enterprise permission structure. The other was simpler, less customizable, and looked almost modest by comparison.
Leadership wanted the first platform. Employees who tested both during the pilot strongly preferred the second.
We went with the capable one initially, because that is what capability-focused procurement processes produce. Adoption was poor. Within three months, enough department heads had complained that leadership revisited the decision. They switched to the simpler platform. Adoption climbed fast. Productivity improved within weeks.
That experience sits with me because it directly contradicts how software procurement is typically framed. Evaluations weight features, integrations, and roadmap. Real adoption is determined by daily usability for people who are not power users, who are not particularly interested in the software, and who have actual jobs to do. Ease of use in a real operational context matters more than feature depth in most enterprise environments. The CFO consequence of getting this backwards is shelfware recurring subscription costs for software producing no operational value.
How to Spot a Failing Rollout Before Leadership Notices
It’s not like when an appliance fails to be adopted, it tells you that it isn’t working. It builds up slowly between the display in the dashboard and the actual work that employees do.
I now use the behavioral clues as a checklist, as they are reliable enough. Teams begin capturing data into spreadsheet for activities that it should be doing. This is because managers are no longer confident with the results of the system itself, and want to report manually. Tickets go up for support weeks after training has been done that should provide answers to basic usability issues. The heads of the departments create side workflows, parallel to the official one. Then there’s the sentence that makes it obvious that something is amiss more than any other “We still use the old process for now.
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The meaning of for now is in most cases for always.
These signals can be seen weeks or months before an executive escalation, and they can easily be seen by anyone who takes the time to work with operational teams not by counting on metrics from the vendor’s dashboard. Adoption statistics are based on logins. They have no way to determine if there’s any value or purpose in the software.
IBM said in its enterprise technology research that the cost of the poorly executed technology adoption becomes a compounding loss of productivity because the costs are spread out across individual workflows, and not a direct line item cost in organizational budgets. That’s the way SaaS rollups go wrong monetarily – it costs a lot in ways that aren’t apparent in project accounting.
A Specific Action You Can Take Before the End of This Week
If you are currently rolling out or on watch for a rollout, do this before Friday.
Do not select an entire company, just select a single department. One team. Set up a 30-minute meeting with 3-5 individuals that are actual users of the platform who use it every day. Not their managers. The actual users. Use only three questions and when answered, don’t justify the software, talk about vendor limitations or use the term “adoption”.
Asks what are the major obstacles in the current system? Ensure that they are asked about what is not needed on the platform for their work. Discuss which thing used to be easy to do prior to the software, but isn’t anymore.
Then cease talking and listen! Make notes of what you hear. The time, in that thirty minutes, will yield more information that is useful operationally than will the majority of organizations experience in weeks of formal feedback processes. Users have a realistic understanding of the location of friction. In fact, they’re seldom asked outright and they’re almost never asked in a situation where they think it would be punished if they were to reveal it.
Realizing the feedback that is the real beginning of rollout recovery.
The Vendor Incentive Problem Nobody Discusses at the Contract Table
Typically, SaaS vendors wish your rollout to be successful. Indeed, it’s that. It is crucial for customer retention, and that is something software companies could not have been more aware of 10 years ago than modern SaaS companies are.
But vendors also demand contracts be signed within reasonable time frames, and implementation timelines originate from the nicest cases in their customer base; not the dirtiest ones. The timeframe between the vendor’s implementation date and the time that your organization is ready to implement is invariably greater than it’s presented until it’s in your hands.
At my own seat, I’ve heard the professional services team from the vendors say that a 12 week implementation is standard and then privately, the internal IT team say that it will take them six months, depending on their data cleanup needs alone. The two estimates were justifiable. They were measuring various things. The vendor performed software deployment measurement. The IT team took a look at the organizational readiness issue prior to it.
Prior to signing an enterprise SaaS contract, clear up any misunderstandings by asking the vendor directly What were the three toughest implementations that you’ve had in your recent client portfolio and what did those customers miss? That’s a difficult question to ask. The value of answers is much more significant than the product roadmap presentation.
What the Companies That Get This Right Actually Do Differently
If one thing comes across in my mind after seeing some of the most successful SaaS efforts I’ve seen, it’s that they start slowly and gradually.Only after looking at some of the more successful SaaS deployments do I think “Well, that one thing was obvious up front they took their time.”
They are not deployed company-wide but begin with a small number of users (20-50), from one business unit, that is representative of the real-world usage of the platform. Their intention for this pilot is to discover issues, not success. Collect complaints actively. They study workarounds. They rebuild workflows prior to scaling.
A SaaS rollout I’ve seen in a health care organization manifested a delayed company-wide rollout that was nearly two months later due to the confusion identified in the reporting process during the pilot which would have created lots of operational issues when scaled up. There was a lack of action and frustration with the delay. The redesign was implemented at a rapid speed and resistance-free, for the company as a whole. By delaying the two months at the front the recovery at the back was saved from being much longer.
The most common SaaS rollouts failure is when companies take a haste-to-launch approach when implementing SaaS. The more rapid a launch, the slower the recovery. The teams that are not rushing to do so and consider the pilot phase as real learning and not a starting point before the real launch, do better in the long run.
When you’re on the journey of selecting SaaS and planning its rollout in an organization, it’s important to consider and discuss how the actions of selecting enterprise software impact the other software’s architecture and how those platforms relate to one another.
The Honest Answer to What Actually Fixes This
Fewer assumptions. More patience. Prior to deployment, the redesign of work flow. Not only that, but really the organization is willing to listen and not think that the input is disloyalty.
The organizations that have been successful time and time again with SaaS have discontinued the belief of software as a solution to organizational issues. They apply software to build on organizations’ strengths where they already exist. That’s a philosophical description until you look at what it can be like when you are in the midst of it. When a SaaS platform comes along, disorganized processes are more evident. They increase the efficiency of functional processes. It doesn’t make the result happen, it only helps it happen or it reveals that the foundation was less than strong than the leaders realized.
This is a competitive edge that is present and accumulative to those that do get it right. Faster customer response. Cleaner internal data. Lower operational friction. Better forecasting. In B2B settings, where the groups that successfully get things done in the implementation phase go further and faster, and remain ahead of the curve on the measurable metrics that are most relevant to customers, is a group that wins.
The question to contemplate is not whether or not your platform is good. It probably is. The issue is whether your organization is ready to utilize it and also whether leadership is forthright enough to learn as well as discover prior to signing the contract isn’t after the spreadsheets come back.
Author
Talha Qureshi is an enterprise technology analyst and blogger with over a decade of hands-on experience across cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, B2B SaaS, and enterprise AI. He writes about the gap between how enterprise technology is marketed and how it actually performs in real organizational environments.
