3 critical ways your business transformation will fail

And what to do about it

Why an agile operating model is key to your transformation

Over $2T will be spent on business transformations in 2022 [1] in the hope agility will transform the enterprise and bring it significant results: decreased costs, decreased risk, and improved productivity. These transformations are designed to create an environment that enables executives to adapt to rapidly to changing customer needs and stakeholder demands in a strategic rather than reactive way.

Unfortunately, 84% of these initiatives will fail [2].

Why do transformations fail?

target-miss

1. Lack of alignment to business outcomes:

Most strategies set project management goals, such as on-time, on-budget, and activity based delivery milestones. Upon completion, business then seeks gain benefits and outcomes. They struggle to establish and iteratively reap true impact and outcomes in financial language, such as cost savings and cost of delay.

brain-head-1

2. Lack of awareness:

People fear what they don’t understand. The majority of staff reject a transformation’s new roles, responsibilities and processes, even if they will improve their lives, unless they are slowly, consistently educated.

human-resources-hierarchy

3. Micromanagement:

Traditional management culture requires task-management and direction. Agile teams require self-organisation through establishing consistent guardrails for decision-making. The clash of the two creates friction that undermines progress of transformation goals.

legal-scale-unequal

4. Lack of consistency:

Language is a key influencer of culture. When people don’t receive industry-aligned training, or their knowledge and skills are out-of-date, misunderstanding of new practices increases, including why they are being adopted. Not using experienced practitioners to coach and train people is a key factor in failure.

Avoiding failure: 3 key issues

To avoid failure of your business transformation, ZXM works with executives to plan strategies against
three key issues and actively works to mitigate them.

Download the whitepaper

ZXM’s whitepaper highlights:

  • The three main reasons why transformations fail.
  • Why a composable mindset is key to success.
  • What actions are required for a scalable and repeatable business transformation.

End notes.

1. IDC Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide

2. Forbes (2022). 12 reasons your digital transformation will fail.

agile iq academy logo 2022-05-05 sm

Enter your details

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close