The pattern is always the same. A department head identifies a pain point — usually some flavor of "our current system is awful." Procurement gets involved. A few demos happen. Somebody's favorite vendor wins. Six months into implementation, the project team realizes the new platform automates a workflow nobody validated, integrates with systems nobody documented, and replaces a tool that twelve other departments quietly depended on.
Now you're nine months in, half the budget is gone, and the steering committee is asking why adoption is at 40%.
The fix is unsexy: do the discovery work first.
Real discovery means walking the actual process — not the version in the SOP, the version that happens on a Tuesday at 3 pm when somebody's covering for somebody else. It means identifying every system the current workflow touches, including spreadsheets, personal email folders, and the Slack channel where real decisions are made. It means talking to the people who do the work, not just the people who manage them.
You'll find three things every time:
A process that's substantially more complicated than the leadership thinks it is
At least one integration that nobody mentioned in the requirements doc
A workaround that someone built years ago that quietly holds the whole thing together
That's the discovery output. Not a 40-page requirements document. A clear-eyed map of what the work actually is, where the breakage happens, and what a new tool would have to handle to be a real upgrade — not a lateral move with a different login screen.
The vendors you're evaluating don't do this for you. They can't. They're selling features against a use case you describe to them, and if the use case is wrong, the demo will look great, and the implementation will be a disaster.
A two-week discovery phase up front saves you a six-month implementation rescue later. It's the cheapest project insurance you'll ever buy.
If you're about to buy enterprise software and you haven't mapped the process yet, that's the conversation to have first. Book a scoping call.
