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We recently brought three experts for a panel on change management and complex implementations. Our candid conversation with Movemedical CCO Ted Ruscitti, Rubica Client Solutions Director Sue Gordon, and Stryker Director of Mako Business Unit Jason Henderson gave us a crash course on the key pitfalls companies experience when undergoing a change or implementation and how to avoid them. Here are the twelve most important takeaways from the panel.
1. The most common mistake happens before anyone touches the technology.
Most organizations jump straight to deployment without ever clearly defining what success looks like. Before the first line of configuration is written, you need executive alignment, a mapped stakeholder landscape, and a shared definition of value by function, by team, and by user group. Without that definition, you’re building a sandy foundation that no amount of sophisticated technology will fix it.
2. Implementation and change management are not the same thing.
Deploying a system is a technical and operational task. Getting people to change how they work is a human one. Companies that blur these two tasks end up with a functioning platform that nobody uses. As Sue Gordon put it: implementation is how you stand up a system. Change management is how you get your people to use it. The work of change management has to start before the implementation begins, not after.
3. The ROI case you build in the boardroom needs to translate to the field.
Most value cases are built at the executive level and never translated into terms that individual teams or field users can see themselves in. Every person affected by the change needs to understand their specific contribution to the goal — not just the aggregate number. Break ROI down by role, by division, and by year. When people can see themselves in the number, accountability follows.
4. If they are part of the journey, they are more forgiving of the bumps.
Jason Henderson shared how he brought every affected function into one room before Stryker signed anything. This included key stakeholders from groups like customer service, operations, clinical, sales, and IT. The result was something rare: unanimous agreement across every business unit and every global region. The takeaway was simple. When people feel like they helped write the story, they champion the change rather than resist it. Change fatigue is real. Inclusion is theantidote.
5. Before you automate, standardize your process.
One of the most common and costly mistakes in any implementation is building a system around a possibly broken or inconsistent process. If your field team is performing the same set of tasks in unique ways based on region or product line, a new tool will not fix that. All it will do is make the inconsistency faster. Defining the gold standard process must come first, or you are locking in the problem and paying a premium to do it.
6. You can be months into an implementation and still not be aligned.
The warning signs of internal misalignment are subtle at first. Divisions that weren't consulted. Stakeholders who nod in meetings but haven't bought in. Teams building toward go-live while key users are still in the dark. The cost is not just time. It is rework, resistance, and an ROI that never materializes because the people accountable for it were never brought along.
7. Don’t start small. Start complex.
When organizations want to test before they commit, they almost always start with a small, simple business unit as the subject of their pilot. Jason Henderson made the case for doing the opposite. His experience taught him that smaller pilots tend to have the most unusual processes and edge cases. This approach leads to building something overly customized that does not scale. Starting with a larger, more complex unit for your pilot gives you better signal, more consistent data, and a cleaner case for every other business unit that follows.
8. Scope creep does not announce itself. It accumulates.
The earliest signal of scope creep is usually well-intentioned — a stakeholder request here, a workaround there, a feature that wasn't in scope but seems reasonable. Without a formal governance structure and a strong internal project lead who can route every new request back to the original goal, those small additions quietly compound until the project no longer resembles what was agreed. The antidote is structure, not suspicion.
9. Everyone thinks their priority deserves top billing.
Sue Gordon's goal alignment tool — Easy Wins, Hard Wins, Move to Later, Stop — is simple in concept and hard in practice. Every stakeholder believes their request is high value and low effort. This framework is most effective when teams use it to stay anchored to the original goal, not to justify what they already wanted to do. Prioritize value to goal first. Effort second. Everything else is just noise.
10. Go-live is day one, not the finish line.
The strongest customer success teams never stop measuring against the original value objectives. They watch for declining feature engagement, audit completion rates that drop after the first wave of training, and divisions where adoption looked strong early but has quietly stalled. The goal post go-live is not maintenance. It is continuous alignment. Are we delivering what we promised? If not, what do we adjust?
11. Inconsistent adoption does not just slow you down. It corrupts your data.
When part of your team adopts the system and part does not, the data degrades from both directions. Users who partially comply introduce bad inputs alongside good ones — and the clean data you built the ROI case on gets quietly undermined by the very people the system was supposed to help. Adoption is not just a change management metric. It is a data integrity issue.
12. High performers are not the problem. The system is.
Jason framed the entire change management conversation around one insight: the friction his field reps were experiencing was not a talent problem. It was a systems problem. Too many platforms. Too much manual duplication. Too much administrative burden crowding out customer-facing time. When you fix the system, the people do not need to change — they get to do more of what they are actually good at.
The Bottom Line
All these learnings point to the same truth: the organizations that get this right don't wait until the pain is obvious. They get ahead of it.
If this conversation resonated, whether you're building the case for change or already in motion and wondering why things aren't moving the way you hoped, there are two ways to take the next step.
Watch the full session. Hear Ted, Sue, and Jason go deeper on every one of these twelve points with real examples from inside the industry's most complex organizations.
Talk to someone who can help. If you're ready to stop wondering where your operation is leaking value and start doing something about it, let's have that conversation.
