It is rarely the model that sinks a rollout. It is the five questions your IT lead asks in the first ten minutes, and whether anyone can answer them without a call back to the vendor.
The pilot goes well. A partner sees a month-end pack drafted in eleven minutes and asks how quickly it can go firm-wide. Then it reaches the person who owns your Microsoft tenancy, and it stops for four months.
This is not obstruction. Your IT lead is being asked to vouch for a system that reads client financial records, and the questions they ask are the same five every time. Firms that lose momentum here are almost never let down by output quality; they simply cannot show where the data sits.
The firms that clear review fastest are the ones that bring the trace to the first meeting instead of the demo.
A demo answers a partner's question — can it do the work. It answers none of IT's. What moves a review along is a single completed run with its citations, its approval and its retention setting visible in one place, plus the data-processing terms attached.
Put your IT lead in the second meeting rather than the sixth. The questions do not get easier later, and answering them early usually turns your skeptic into the person who sponsors the rollout.
If it helps, take our answers to those five questions as your starting checklist and hold every vendor, us included, to them.
We would rather answer the hard questions early than charm you now and stall in procurement later.
Book a working session