You know that expensive software system your company bought that everyone... stopped using? Deborah Kaminetzky sees this pattern constantly. Projects delivered on time and on budget that still fail because nobody wants to touch them.

Deb brings a unique lens to technology implementation. She's a former attorney turned project management consultant who specializes in what she calls the "messy middle" – the space between buying software and actually getting value from it. Her secret? Translation. Not just between tech teams and business teams, but between what's being sold and what people actually need to do their jobs.

In this episode, we dig into why user involvement isn't just a nice-to-have (spoiler: shadow IT is alive and well), the difference between being heard and influencing outcomes, and why your C-suite needs to stop treating technology teams like the organizational stepchild.

This Week's Takeaways:

1. Solve the problem before you buy the solution – Understanding what you're actually trying to fix has to come before you start shopping for software. This seems obvious, but most organizations skip this step entirely.
2. Mediation matters more than metrics – When users are involved in gathering information and partially in decision-making, adoption happens. When they're just told what to do, they find workarounds. The question is: how much of that involvement is just making people feel heard versus actually changing what gets built?
3. Outcomes over outputs – On-time, on-budget means nothing if the software gathers dust. Find ways to measure whether you're getting the value you expected, not just whether you hit the deadline.

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