Most password manager rollouts fail for the same reason: the tool is introduced without deciding how it will be organised, everyone invents their own structure, and within a month the shared credentials are back in a spreadsheet.
Decide the structure before you invite anyone
Two things need to be settled first. What belongs in a personal vault versus a shared collection, and who owns each collection. Get those wrong and no amount of training will rescue it.
- Personal vault — individual logins only that person uses
- Shared collections — organised by team or system, each with a named owner
- Admin collection — infrastructure and privileged credentials, deliberately restricted
Recovery is the part people skip
Decide now what happens when someone forgets their master password, and when someone leaves unexpectedly. Both will happen. Organisational account recovery needs to be enabled and tested before you need it, not during the incident where you discover you cannot reach the only copy of a critical credential.
Retire the spreadsheet deliberately
Import it, verify the entries, then delete it — including the copies in email, the one on the file share, and the printed page in the drawer. A password manager alongside a spreadsheet is a password manager plus a spreadsheet.
The vault only helps once it is the only place anyone looks.
Turn on the unglamorous settings
Enforce MFA on the vault itself. Set a sensible timeout. Enable breach reporting so you find out about a reused password from your own tooling rather than from somebody else.