Just forced every team in our org to stop using Slack for two weeks. Mandatory experiment with three approved alternatives. No exceptions.
The goal was to kill the "we've always used it" inertia before renewal. The results weren't about picking a tool. They were about exposing dysfunction.
* Teams that actually needed real-time chat hated the switch. Productivity nosedived. Proved their original use case.
* Teams that were already misusing Slack for async project updates? They loved one of the alternatives. Showed they never needed real-time to begin with.
* Two departments quietly went back to email. They shouldn't have been on a paid team chat tool at all.
Now we're cutting licenses by 40% and letting teams choose from two options, not one. Forced experimentation is the only way to see what people actually need, not what they're used to. Your "standardized rollout" is probably just vendor lock-in by another name.
—Skeptic
—Skeptic