Why digital transformation projects stall halfway through

Digital transformation is a phrase that covers several projects, from replacing a legacy finance system to redesigning the way an organisation interacts with its customers. What the projects have in common is that a significant proportion of them stall before they reach the original objective. The reasons are more predictable than most organisations expect.

The brief that was never quite agreed ¶

The most common cause of a stalled transformation project is a brief that was agreed at a high level but never resolved into specific, testable requirements. The leadership team agreed that the organisation needed a new customer management system. What they did not agree was which customer journeys the system needed to support, what data would need to migrate from the existing system, or what success would look like at the end of the project.

By the time the delivery team is six months in, the gap between what different stakeholders understood the project to be becomes visible. The project does not stop. It slows, as each decision requires a conversation that should have happened before the contract was signed.

The governance gap ¶

Transformation projects require someone with the authority to make decisions and the time to make them promptly. In practice, the person with the authority is often a senior leader who is also running the organisation's day-to-day operations. Decisions that should take a week take a month. The delivery team works around the gap, making assumptions that accumulate into a system that does not quite match what anyone intended.

A project board that with monthly is not sufficient governance for a transformation project. The decisions that need to be made are too frequent and too consequential for a monthly cadence to keep pace with them.

What to do when a project is already stalling ¶

The first step is an honest assessment of where the project actually is, as distinct from where the project plan says it is. That requires talking to the delivery team without the project manager in the room, reviewing the original brief against what has been built, and identifying the decisions that have been deferred rather than made.

A rescue engagement is different from a fresh start. The objective is not to redesign the project but to identify the specific blockages and address them in order of impact. Some of them will be technical. Most of them will be about people, decisions, and accountability.

If your organisation has a transformation project that has been running longer than expected and is not delivering what was originally intended, a diagnostic conversation is a reasonable next step. We have done this enough times to know what to look for.