You know TTV is a problem. You do not know which part.
That gap between knowing something is wrong and knowing where it is wrong is expensive. You end up making changes to the whole delivery model when the problem lives in one specific place.
This post shows you how to find that place.
There are three places implementations stall.
Every implementation goes through the same rough shape. A customer signs. Someone owns getting them live. At some point they are live and using the product.
Inside that shape there are three zones where time consistently disappears.
Zone 1: The handoff. The gap between contract close and kickoff. Customer energy is highest right after they sign. Every week that passes before onboarding starts is momentum your team has to rebuild from scratch. This stall is invisible because nothing has technically gone wrong yet.
Zone 2: Early milestones. Configuration, integration, enablement. This is where dates start slipping quietly. A customer can be hitting every checkpoint and still not be moving toward real value. Completion is not the same as progress.
Zone 3: Post go live activation. The implementation closes. The handoff to CS happens. The customer is expected to adopt the product, train the team, and build the workflows. When this stalls it usually does not surface until renewal. By then the cost to fix it is high and the window is narrow.
Most PS organizations have one primary stall zone. Some have two. The goal is to find yours.
How to find your stall point.
Pull your last 20 to 30 closed implementations. Include a mix of on time, late, and churned accounts if you can get them.
For each zone ask these questions.
Zone 1: How many days between contract close and kickoff on average? Who owns the customer relationship in that gap? What does the customer receive from your team before day one of onboarding?
Zone 2: What are your defined milestones and do you have a written definition of done for each one? How often are milestone dates pushed and at which stage does slippage start most often? Are you tracking customer engagement at each milestone or just completion?
Zone 3: What does your PS to CS handoff look like and what actually gets transferred? Do you have a defined activation period after go live or does the customer just land in CS? What is your product adoption rate at 30, 60, and 90 days post go live?
You will not have clean answers to all of these. That is fine. The gaps in your answers are part of the finding.
What to look for once you have the data.
You are looking for patterns not exceptions.
A stage where dates consistently slip across multiple accounts. A customer segment that shows up over and over in your at risk or churned accounts. A handoff moment where engagement noticeably drops. A milestone that everyone completes but that does not seem to correlate with how healthy the account is six months later.
When a pattern shows up across three or more accounts you have found something worth acting on. When it shows up across five or more it is structural. Structural problems do not get solved by working harder inside the same model.
Trust the outliers too. The accounts that went fastest tell you what good looks like when conditions are right. The accounts that failed hardest tell you where your model breaks under pressure. Both matter.
What to do when you find it.
Fix one zone at a time.
The instinct is to address everything at once. That spreads effort across the whole machine again and you end up with marginal improvements everywhere instead of a real fix anywhere.
Pick the zone where the data is clearest. Design a targeted intervention. Measure whether it moves the number before you layer in anything else.
A handoff problem gets fixed with a structured pre kickoff motion and a clear owner for the gap period.
An early milestone problem usually requires rewriting what done actually means at each stage and adding engagement signals not just completion checkboxes.
An activation problem requires a designed post go live period. Not a handoff document. An active playbook that CS runs for the first 60 to 90 days with clear triggers for when to re-engage PS.
Want to skip the spreadsheet?
The TTV Stall Finder does this analysis for you. Upload your project data and get a structured breakdown of exactly where time to value is breaking down in your portfolio. By phase, by segment, by pattern. It takes minutes. The diagnosis is free.
Run your first diagnostic free at app.cadenceops.io/signup