---
title: "The system went live eight months ago"
number: 35
date: 2026-09-17
url: https://trevin.co/writing/the-system-went-live-eight-months-ago
standfirst: "When nobody designs how the business will run in a new system, the people at the desks decide it one workaround at a time."
topics: ["Decision governance", "ERP programs"]
---
# The system went live eight months ago

When nobody designs how the business will run in a new system, the people at the desks decide it one workaround at a time.

The system went live eight months ago. Training was done. The project team has moved on.

And every morning someone opens it and has to work out how their job actually works now.

Not which button. Who owns this step. Who signs it off when the amount is unusual. What to do when the case does not fit any of the options on the screen.

So they work it out themselves.

A spreadsheet beside the platform, because the report does not come out the way finance needs it. A rule of thumb one team follows and the team next door does not. An approval that goes to whoever answers first. A workaround that started as a temporary fix and is now simply the way it is done.

Nobody wrote any of this down. It is not in the training material. It is not in the process maps. It lives in the heads of four or five people, and it changes depending on who is away.

The people doing the work are not confused. They are deciding. Every day, dozens of small calls about how the organisation should run, made quietly at a desk by someone who was never asked to make them and gets no credit when they get it right.

Those decisions were always going to be made. The only question was whether they were made once, deliberately, before go live, or a thousand times afterwards by whoever was holding the case.

If you went live this year, ask one person who uses it daily what they do when the case does not fit. The gap between their answer and the process map is what your stabilisation phase is actually paying for.

What is your team working around right now?