Large transformation programs are complex by nature. But after years of working with difficult transformation programs, we have found that organizations often make that complexity much harder to manage than it needs to be.
Complexity is not always the problem. Unmanaged, and often self-created, complexity is.
A practitioner’s perspective
Some years ago, after helping turn around a large global SAP Customer Experience program, I was contacted by several customers asking a surprisingly simple question: what did you do differently?
My answer was a set of practical keys to success, which I refined through discussions and workshops with customers over the years. The pattern was remarkably consistent. Weak governance and pragmatic change management were recurring problems. But an even more fundamental issue appeared again and again: many organizations had invested in a solution without a sufficiently clear and shared understanding of what they wanted to achieve with it.
