Go-Live is a Warm Puppy

There's a photo of Bentley from the day he came home: eight weeks old, roughly twelve pounds, completely unaware of what was about to unfold. Five months later, he's forty-five pounds and has become, unexpectedly, one of the more honest mirrors I've encountered for what campus modernization actually feels like from the inside.

The Plan Always Starts Strong

To prepare for Bentley's arrive we followed the checklist, did our homework, consulted the experts and mobilized the team. It was a scramble, I must say. We had to install the puppy gates, revise our calendar commitments, repurpose a garden bed as the puppy "potty spot" outside. It was a whirlwind, but for a stretch it all seemed entirely (mostly) manageable.

That feeling is familiar to anyone who's been part of a technology implementation kick-off. The roadmap looks clear, the team is energized, and the scope feels like something your institution can actually hold. For a while, that confidence is entirely justified. Things get hairy during the implementation and stress sets in, but the finish line is in view.

Go-Live Is Where the Real Work Begins

Bentley came home, and that was our go-live date. We sorted out the leashes and figured out which crates we actually needed, but living with a puppy turned out to be a fundamentally different experience than preparing for one. This jumping, biting, stinking animal was in our home...to stay.

The same is true once a new system is live. Your team is no longer working toward something; they're working within something, building confidence through daily use and discovering which processes hold up and which ones need rethinking. The adjustment period after go-live is where the most durable institutional learning tends to happen, and it deserves as much planning and support as the implementation itself.

What Carries You Through

The institutions that come out stronger on the other side aren't necessarily the ones with the most detailed plans or with the best implementation strategy. They're the ones that stayed curious when complexity surfaced, communicated openly when things got hard, and treated uncertainty as useful information rather than evidence of failure. After go-live, they continued mobilizing themselves through years of stablization that follows. No checklist fully captures what it's like to actually be in it, but a team that's prepared to adapt will always find its footing.

Bentley's still teaching me, and so is every campus I work with.

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