Adoption Lessons
What rolling Claude out in our own firm taught us, one lesson at a time.
What these are
Each lesson is one thing that went right or wrong in a real Claude rollout, and the number that makes it a lesson rather than an opinion. About 600 words. Readable before your next meeting.
The lessons
Training
A control without an owner is a wish
Our training gate got 20 of 22 licensed users through before they touched Claude. The two it missed were new starters, because the gate lived in a project, not in onboarding.
Governance
Three policy versions in five months is a good sign
Our AI policy changed three times in five months. Each version answered something people actually did. A policy that never changes is a policy nobody is using.
Governance
The policy Claude read was four months out of date
Claude does your work the way your documents describe it. If nobody wrote it down, or the copy it reads is stale, it guesses. Ours was four months behind.
Adoption
Ask people to brag
A Slack workflow for sharing one good use of Claude logged over 30 wins, and the champions turned up in it without anyone appointing them.
Adoption
Take the tool to where people already work
Claude Tag and Slackbot were both in Slack by late June, and usage of both was poor. The tools were fine. We hadn't moved our skills or settled whose access they used.
Build
The hard part of Claude Code wasn’t Claude. It was Git.
Our delivery team was using Claude Code on real work within weeks. The hard part was learning version control at the same time. Forty-odd repositories are still to bring into line.
Skills
The ten settings at the top of a skill (and the seven that won’t travel)
A few lines at the top of a skill decide whether it fires, who can run it and where it works. Seven of the ten worth knowing work only in Claude Code.
Build
What is an Agent (and why you probably don’t need one yet)
An agent is Claude with a goal, tools and permission to keep going without asking. Most businesses that ask for one need three skills and a policy.