Six pitfalls why strategic enterprise programs fail
Why strategic enterprise programs fail!
Strategic enterprise programs are your lifeblood in today’s competitive environment. They are your best-planned initiatives. You have the best solution thought out. The best and brightest of developers and technology pundits are lined up for you. Yet why strategic enterprise programs fail!
The problem lies deep-rooted in the execution.
I would like to substantiate 6 common pitfalls that can break your strategic enterprise programs. I had the opportunity to learn these first-hand over the years while helping different insurance carriers in their transformation journies.
In most cases, I have seen many enterprise strategic programs fated to meet one of the below definitions of failure:
- Programs stopped before successful completion
- Reduced business value from the program
- High turnaround time of program impacting ROI
- Missed business opportunity and a poor time to market
Here are the common pitfalls of why strategic enterprise programs fail–
1. Lack of involvement from cross-functional teams
Why cross-functional teams are important?
Most strategic initiatives cut through multiple business functions across the enterprise. As a result, they rely quite heavily on the active participation of the cross-functional teams.
Why are they not involved?
Traditionally, in large organizations, cross-functional teams work in silos. Each of these cross-functional teams usually works on a narrow domain and often fails to see the big picture or value of strategic enterprise initiatives.
What is the result?
As a result, they do not involve themselves enough that can guarantee success for large and strategic enterprise initiatives. This is a big roadblock to the success of such initiatives.
2. Low business confidence
Why low business confidence in strategic enterprise programs?
In most scenarios, the IT teams plan and steer the execution of strategic enterprise programs without significant participation from business. The major drawback of this approach is that it leads to a big gap between IT and business players concerning the programs.
Too much of “technical” jargon and processes that often wrap the work create more confusion than clarity for business. Without effective bridging, communications fail between business and IT teams.
What it leads to?
Business leaders fail to understand progress or if the definitions of success are being met through the work that IT teams are doing. They often fail to visualize the success and value of their investments in the program. This leads to rising skepticism, sinking confidence and disillusionment for business.
This, lack of business confidence is a big reason why many strategic high-stake programs get called off prematurely.
3. The tussle between business and technical teams
The business and IT teams do not understand each other, as straight as that. While IT teams lack domain knowledge and interpret business requirements incorrectly, the business fails to appreciate technical complexities or the nuances that drive the work from a systemic standpoint.
The resulting tussle between business and IT impact the quality, cost, and schedule of the program which eventually leads to failure.
4. Parallel running programs
Why do programs run in parallel?
Time is of the essence. In today’s world, IT teams have to generate value as quickly as possible to help the business realize that value and sustain the competitive market. The result of this is that there are often too many initiatives that keep running at the same time.
What is the impact?
With each of these initiatives considered strategic in its own right, having them run in parallel with limited resources and environments result in deadlock situations. They soon turn into roadblocks for each other at some point along the path.
Many critical initiatives get backed off due to these conflicts before they could reach the finish line successfully.
5. Poor change management
What triggers change management?
The journey of an enterprise initiative is full of uncertainties. There could be operational challenges, change in business priorities, budget constraints, resource issues, vendor issues, market slowdowns, and a hell of others that can pop up at any time along the life cycle of such a program.
What poor change management can lead to?
Such uncertainties can invalidate the original goal, plan of action and approach to the work. It might require super-high agility and adaptation to changing conditions the strategies for which should be factored into the initial and original plan. Failure to do so can be a recipe for failure.
6. Data quality issues
Data is the king that drives business. Strategic initiatives regardless of how well planned can fall on its face if data that it will use cannot pass the minimum viable quality test. That is where enterprise data governance is so critical.
Not having the right data quality can be a recipe for failure even with the best execution plan in hand.
Let’s wrap up on why strategic enterprise programs fail and what we can do the first thing to stop them.
While I laid out my experience in this article, there could be a myriad of other reasons why strategic enterprise programs fail. Here are interesting perspectives from Forbes why strategic plans can fail.
What is the potential remedy?
What I learned from my experience first hand is that setting up a core committee or a COE to over-sight large scale enterprise programs would be beneficial. The COE must contain representatives from all quarters including business, IT, executive leadership, and different cross-functional teams.
It is critical to entrust the COE with tasks that would make them accountable for the success of the program.
Here is a related topic of why platform modernizations can fail.
Please feel free to provide thoughts and comments.
