For most projects, the language of delivery is about deadlines. There’s a date circled on the calendar, a milestone in the plan, and a countdown on the wall. Go-live day. The promise that everything changes at once.
But in practice, nothing about go-live is neat. A system can be switched on, users can be given logins, and the lights on the project dashboard can all turn green, and yet the business continues, for months, to live in two worlds. The old spreadsheets still hum in the background, the new platform is only partially adopted, and the reality of day-to-day work doesn’t match the ribbon-cutting moment.
The lingering shadow of spreadsheets
Go-live doesn’t kill spreadsheets. At best, it reduces their role. For a time, old templates continue running in parallel with the new system. Teams update data twice. Some prefer the familiarity of the sheet they know. Others are told they must keep one season’s worth of information in the old format until the stock is through. What was supposed to be a single handover becomes a staggered, messy migration.
The problem isn’t spreadsheets themselves; they’re flexible, accessible, and often necessary. The problem is when they remain the real source of truth, while the new system becomes a side-show. That’s not a technology issue. It’s an adoption issue.
Why the ‘big switch’ rarely works
Treating go-live as a single date is seductive. It’s easier for project managers to track. It’s easier for leadership to celebrate. Vendors like it too, because it gives them a clear end-point.
The danger is that it creates a false sense of completion. When teams are still working from spreadsheets three months later, frustration grows: why did we bother with this system if nothing has changed? What was framed as the end of the project is actually just the beginning of embedding the change.
A healthier view of go-live
Go-live works best when treated as a transition rather than a deadline. That means being honest from the start:
Define which spreadsheets are being replaced and which will remain, at least for a while. Vagueness is a recipe for duplication.
Plan for dual running. It’s better to acknowledge overlap than to pretend everything will switch off overnight.
Create a realistic sunset window for old processes. Set a horizon; six months, nine months, when the spreadsheet should finally be retired.
Measure adoption, not launch. Success is when the majority of the business runs confidently in the new system, not the moment the system is technically switched on.
The bigger lesson
Go-live is not the finish line. It’s the start of a period where habits, processes, and behaviours are reshaped. The system is only as good as the way it is used, and use takes time to bed in.
If you treat launch day as the end, you’ll be disappointed when spreadsheets are still running a season later. If you treat it as the beginning of transition, you give your teams the space and clarity to embed new ways of working. That’s when the system becomes more than a tool, it becomes part of how the business actually runs.
Takeaway: The real measure of success isn’t whether you’ve gone live. It’s whether, six months later, you’ve stopped looking back.