*Standing out in an increasingly noisy organisation to protect buy-in and user adoption*

How to Find the Right Dose of Visibility for Your IT Program

When managing a high-stakes transformation, the instinct is to broadcast every win, milestone, and update to the entire organisation to prove momentum. But in a saturated corporate environment, treating communication as a single volume knob turned to "max" doesn't ensure alignment—it trains your stakeholders to tune you out.

This article challenges the traditional change management doctrine that "you can’t over-communicate." In the organisational attention economy, your program competes for oxygen against every other initiative. We explore why "broadcasting everything" triggers initiative fatigue and how to calibrate your visibility based on relevance, timing, and organisational climate. You will learn the three common visibility traps that undermine credibility—Noise, Timing, and Climate—and a practical framework for filtering communications to protect your program's ROI.

The Attention Economy of the Enterprise

Your project team lives in a bubble where your transformation is the centre of the universe. It’s natural to assume the rest of the organisation shares this obsession. When you hit a technical milestone like "UAT Phase 1 Complete," it feels like a victory worth sharing.

But for an end-user whose daily workflow won't change for another six months, this isn't a victory. It’s noise.

When you flood the organisation with irrelevant updates, you aren't building awareness; you are creating "alert fatigue." Stakeholders learn to auto-delete your emails because experience has taught them that 90% of your content doesn't affect their Tuesday morning. This becomes a critical risk when go-live approaches. When you finally send the urgent "Action Required" email that actually matters, it gets ignored because you’ve already exhausted your audience’s attention span.

Visibility is not a metric of success. Relevance is.

The Three Visibility Traps That Erode Value

To protect adoption, stop broadcasting and start calibrating. This requires avoiding three specific behavioural traps that plague large-scale tech programs.

The Noise Problem: Signal vs. Relevance The first trap is confusing project milestones with user relevance. We often see programs blast 1,500 employees with updates about backend data migration. For 1,400 of them, this information is useless.

This "spray and pray" approach assumes that awareness equals buy-in. It doesn’t. It creates cognitive load. We worked with a banking client where leadership wanted to keep a rollout "low key" to avoid noise, missing the fact that the software fundamentally shifted power dynamics in the branches. Conversely, we see headquarters staff bombarded with details relevant only to frontline workers.

The Fix: Apply the "Need to Know" filter. If the recipient can’t use the information to prepare, decide, or act, don’t send it.

The Timing Problem: Momentum Decay The second trap is generating excitement too early. We worked with a medical device company where the project team wanted to launch a massive awareness campaign in January for a tool arriving in August.

The logic seems sound: "Build momentum early." The behavioural reality is different. Excitement has a half-life. If you hype a transformation six months before users can touch it, they will move from curiosity to boredom to cynicism before you even go live. By the time the tool arrives, the narrative is stale, and the audience has mentally moved on.

The Fix: Match visibility to experience. Communicate broadly only when users can feel the change—when screens change, training starts, or processes shift.

The Climate Problem: Reading the Room The third trap is tone deafness. This happens when the style of your visibility conflicts with the organisational reality.

Consider a company launching a CRM transformation during a cost-cutting cycle. The project team planned high-production videos and glossy printed materials. While professional, the medium itself would have signaled wasted spending to employees worried about budget cuts. It would have framed the tech investment as "out of touch" with the business reality.

The Fix: Align with the climate. In growth mode, be bold. In austerity, be practical and understated. The medium is the message.

The Solution: Think Like a DJ, Not a Broadcaster

The solution is to stop treating visibility as an on/off switch and start treating it like a mixing board. You are a DJ with multiple faders for different audiences.

Senior Leadership: Needs steady, moderate volume on milestones and risks.

Future Users (6 Months out): Needs near silence. "It's coming, it helps X." That’s it.

Imminent Users (1 Month out): Crank the volume. Tactical guides, support channels, daily tips.

External Partners: Silence until the specific moment of integration.

To execute this, apply the Two-Filter Test to every piece of content before it leaves the project office:

Is it Needed? Does the receiver need this information to do their job right now?

Is it Wise? Does the tone match the current organisational mood?

If it fails either test, kill it.

Key Takeaways for IT Leaders

Attention is a finite resource. It’s more limited than your budget. If you waste it on irrelevant updates early, you won't have it when you need it for go-live.

Relevance > Volume. A quiet program that speaks only when necessary commands more authority than a loud program that spams the organisation.

Calibrate to the Climate. Your communication strategy can’t exist in a vacuum. It has to respect the broader financial and emotional reality of the business.

You are the Brand Manager. As a Program Lead, you must curate the narrative. If you don't control the signal, the organisation will create its own noise.