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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
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