Run your transformation the way you run the business

Around seventy percent of transformations do not deliver what was promised. The post-mortems rarely blame the technology, and they rarely blame the people. They describe a programme that was governed as a project when it should have been governed as a business.

A project has a completion date. A business has a P&L, a cadence, and someone accountable for the number every quarter.

Value cases decay if nobody re-reads them

The benefits case is written once, approved, and filed. Eighteen months later the market has moved, two assumptions are void, and no one has revisited whether the programme is still aimed at the right outcome.

Programmes that hold their value re-underwrite the case on a regular cycle and are willing to kill workstreams that no longer clear the bar.

Operating models are the constraint

Sixty-nine percent of executives say their operating model cannot keep pace with disruption. Technology arrives faster than the decision rights, funding cycles and team structures that determine whether it can be used.

Replatforming without changing how decisions get made produces a modern estate operated at the old speed, which is an expensive way to stand still.

Fund products, not projects

Project funding creates a scramble to spend before the year closes and a cliff when it does. Product funding gives a standing team a budget and a set of outcomes, and lets them adjust the roadmap between them.

It is a finance change as much as a technology one, which is why it usually stalls without a CFO who wants it.