Westminster pilot reports perceived productivity gains with uneven adoption and integration limits

Ask administrative leaders and departmental champions which tasks consume time and which must meet strict accuracy standards. Use the pilot's perceived benefits as a hypothesis to test with HR, finance and IT, not an ROI benchmark. A bounded engagement could compare a small set of drafting, meeting and spreadsheet workflows using today's software. Ask who bears correction costs and how nonusers will be represented. The credible value proposition is learning where licenses are justified while discovering poor fit early. Do not promise the reported perception rate, transferable savings or staffing reductions at a different university.

Separate document drafting, meeting summaries and spreadsheet work into distinct test sets with owner-approved answers. Prerequisites include a configured tenant, safe inputs and reviewers who know the underlying business rules. Include complex files and failed retrievals, and measure review time, completeness and calculation accuracy against the current process. Test permissions and retention before using real personnel or financial records. Because the case describes older integration limitations, verify current behavior directly instead of assuming either persistence or resolution. Proposed proof should report results by task and retain failures rather than averaging them into a single productivity score.

Assign a central evaluation lead and departmental operational owners, with champions allocated time for onboarding and feedback. Recruit both experienced enthusiasts and hesitant users; provide accessible exercises tied to actual work. Establish baseline service measures before rollout and record corrections, support requests and staff experience throughout. Proposed acceptance requires approved-quality outputs, a complete account of total effort and a documented license decision for each workflow. Governance checkpoints should occur before sensitive data use and before renewal. Risks include selection bias, peer pressure to report benefits and treating frequency of use as proof that service quality improved.