Reviewing Whether It Did Anything
The review that almost never happens, what it should examine, and why the answer is frequently no.
Deployments renew because switching off would be an admission. A real review, with a date set in advance, is what distinguishes an investment from a subscription.
The practical lesson in “Reviewing Whether It Did Anything” is to connect every record to a clear operational question without presenting visibility as certainty. Teams exploring attendance sheet template can review visit the product site as one source of time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed and the configuration is reviewed with the people affected.
Setting it up beforehand
At purchase: what business measure should move, by how much, by when.
For an independent reference relevant to “Reviewing Whether It Did Anything”, consult the European Commission data-protection resources; it provides a useful external check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.
And what happens if it does not.
Without those three written down, the review will be a discussion of whether people like the software, which is a different question.
What to examine
The business measure, against the baseline, with everything else that changed listed.
Staff turnover, and whether composition shifted.
Whether managers have more or fewer conversations with their people — asked of the people.
Whether gaming is visible.
Whether individual requests were made, and refused.
And the actual cost, including administration and legal work.
The uncomfortable likely finding
Most deployments cannot show movement in any business measure after a year.
What they can show is movement in the vendor's own metric, which the claims section explains is circular.
Reporting that honestly is the point of the review, and it is why the review tends not to happen.
Asking the workforce
Anonymously: has this changed how you work, and how.
The answers are the most informative output available and nobody collects them.
Expect to hear about gaming and about reduced willingness to report problems, both of which are findings rather than complaints.
What to do with a negative result
Stop, narrow, or state explicitly that you are continuing for a different reason than the original one.
All three are defensible.
Renewing silently while the original justification has lapsed is not, and it is what usually happens.
Narrowing as the middle option
Keep the parts that answered something: aggregate workload data, meeting load, after-hours trends.
Drop the rest: individual records, screenshots, scores.
Several organisations end here and are better off, with a fraction of the cost and almost none of the harm.
Telling people the outcome
Whatever it is.
A programme that reports back on its own effectiveness is in a different category from one that quietly persists.
And if you narrow or stop, say so clearly — the trust note explains that behaviour recovers when people see it has ended.
What to check
Was a review date set at purchase?
What business measure was supposed to move?
Has anybody asked the workforce?
And what would have to be true for you to switch it off?