Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 25 | Page 39

////////////////////////// S tarting with the business vision, you must secure stakeholder buy- in and then leverage investment in the right tools to ensure the smooth planning, communication, implementation and completion of mission-critical Digital Transformation projects. The pressure to digitally transform the business is greater than ever before, but these projects don’t always deliver the benefits to the business that were promised. What’s going wrong? And what is the difference between those businesses that succeed and those that fail on the road to Digital Transformation? Key findings from a recent survey may help shed light on this: • The most successful projects start with a clear, shared vision and purpose • Continuous stakeholder support through all stages of a project is vital to successful completion • It pays to invest in project management tools – organisations with a single, unified platform were three times as likely to report better than expected project outcomes We conducted online interviews with 622 senior business managers in three countries – the US, UK and Germany – and found a worrying disparity between the reported ‘success’ of Digital Transformation projects and their impact on the business. While the vast majority said the project was a success against internal targets (88%), in the final analysis, only 49% could say that it had a significant impact on the business. UK respondents had the least confidence in the tools and support they received when running projects compared to their peers from the US and Germany, with only 44% of UK respondents reporting that their projects ran to schedule compared to 61% of German respondents, indicating there is scope at least for the UK to improve its performance and possibly Germany and the US, too. Digital Transformation: Promise vs reality Keeping up with the competition is one of the key drivers of Digital Transformation (83%) and yet only 13% said their projects www.intelligentcio.com Sarfraz Ali, Senior Director of Market Development at Smartsheet “ THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PROJECTS START WITH A CLEAR, SHARED VISION AND PURPOSE. had actually improved their ability to keep pace with the competition. Nearly half of Digital Transformation projects are running late and in organisations where projects are struggling to stay on schedule, only 27% of respondents were confident that the project would have a powerful impact on the business. Confidence is high at the beginning but begins to drop almost as soon as the rubber hits the road. While 71% of respondents said the project ran better than expected in the development and planning phase, once they hit phase two – sourcing suppliers – confidence plummeted to 22%. Maintaining support from stakeholders over the lifetime of the project was identified as a key risk factor by respondents. Nearly three out of four respondents (73%) said they enjoyed high levels of support at the beginning of a project but support at later stages fell to less than half (48%). INTELLIGENTCIO 39