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Chat with our Head of Data Governance and Compliance - Leading Resolutions
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Chat with our Head of Data Governance and Compliance

Author :
Maria McCoy

Experience Counts

Successful transformation projects require more than just ambition—they demand structure, strategy, and alignment. Our Head of Data Governance and Compliance, Maria McCoy, sits down with our Chief Customer Officer Rob Chapman to share insights on what truly drives transformation success. From key frameworks to practical tips, they unpack the essentials every organisation needs to get right from the start.

 

RC

So Maria, what do you think are the kind of key things that need to be in place for transformations to work successfully?

MC
Well, I think one of the biggest things around data specifically is getting the right organisational buy in and having the right messages being promoted from a leadership level so that it can gain traction. So yes having the right stakeholders engaged at the right time and you know, getting those messages aligned is important. We've obviously seen that from a client engagement recently, where we've had a couple of people in the business who really wanted to build a data management capability, but it didn't have that proper sponsorship from all of the C-Level stakeholders.
Now that they have got all of those guys on board, they've actually got the proper investment for it to go ahead. Now, they're actually going to be able to make that step change and increase maturity change, whereas before it was operational people in the business trying to get it done, bottom up. That made it so much more problematic and difficult for it to stick. So yes, I think the top-down approach has been proven to improve success rates.
RC

Yes I think I think you've hit on one of the ones that seems to be quite a common thread. And I think we'd all agree that stakeholder engagement and sponsorship from the top is absolutely critical to projects being successful.

MC
I also think that how you slice and dice and chunk up the work is quite important, and it's often tricky because you want appropriate funding for the whole piece. But if you want to fund a whole transformation programme and that whole programme is going to be say five years, and however many millions…. it's harder to get stakeholders to sign up to that, because of the uncertainty in the future and because of the risk. So you know, in order to make transformation programmes happen you need to be pragmatic and realistic. You need to break it down into chunks. But of course, the risk of that is you get two or three phases in, and somebody has a change of mind or direction, and you haven't secured that funding for the long term project. So it's a difficult balance. But there is something about appropriately sizing and planning and getting investment in such a way that it is sustainable.
I have seen some transformation programmes which seem to keep rolling on for years, and to a lot of people they don’t seem to have delivered a great deal. They may have delivered some incremental changes, but not what you would think from what is supposed to be a transformational programme - every time they start to try and tackle some of the thornier stuff, it sort of seems to escalate in complexity. So, it's almost like they're dancing around the edges of it without really tackling the meaty part. Ideally each phase should be a clear building block to the next phase. And there is a risk that incremental discovery work can end up in analysis paralysis.
RC

I know you've seen the MVP sort of approach as well and how that seemed more impactful?

MC
The MVPs are definitely making more rapid progress, but MVPs by nature are smaller pieces of work and less transformational, I guess. MVP is kind of a misnomer anyway. These pieces of work are more like proofs of concept or proofs of technology. It's a little bit like applying an agile methodology. You've got to be careful that you're not making progress by just taking off all of the governance layers and introducing risk.
An MVP enables you to go more quickly, but then when they take an MVP that's been successful and want to productionise it, it hasn't gone through all of the layers of governance, so you need to sort of take a step back and not get quite so enthusiastic. But by nature, these MVPs are smaller things. They're like a product delivery or to get a new tool or piece of software. They may well be building blocks, but they're not necessarily transforming the way that the business operates because that can be more difficult to do, as a proof of concept.
RC

I think I've asked the question because of having that discussion with one of the other consultants yesterday. And they were saying that you can't remove that planning layer. You can't remove that governance layer even if you're going to use slightly different methodologies because you still need to have those controls, and baseline where you are and what you're working against to really understand whether you're making an impact or not. Sometimes people get caught up in the in the enthusiasm of what an MVP can be, without actually understanding the context in which it operates, which I think is important. And what about things like the people who get involved in transformation projects from the client side and from our side? Any thoughts in terms of the team structures or the shape of project teams etcetera that you need for them to be successful?

MC
I mean… nothing as a consistent lesson across different transformation programmes, just that stakeholder engagement and communications is obviously really, really, key. And I've found greater success where you're supported by somebody from a communications team, someone who really knows how to do this stuff and can put together some much more interesting ways of getting this information out to people.
Like video blogs, animations, talks at town halls, bite sized learning, or being part of corporate newsletters. There are lots of different vehicles that you can use to get the message out. But enlisting an actual comms specialist from the organisation to help with that, has proven to be really successful for at least 3 of my client projects. Their contributions are more professional looking and more visually engaging, than what the project team would otherwise have produced. Sending out an e-mail saying, “We've got a new policy. Here's a link. Go read it”… nobody's going to go read a policy. So, yes, there's a big thing about comms and that can really give you success or failure when it comes to embedding change and transformation.
RC

Agreed, I think that's true. That's a really key point. And in terms of some of the change champions and stuff like that, I know you've been a real advocate of creating communities which stay connected and take stewardship and ownership of what's going on. What do you think are the benefits of that, Maria, where they do get those change champions engaged and owning what's going on?

MC
Well, there are a few nice things about creating communities of practise. One is that you can capitalise on where somebody is enthusiastic about something and really wants to help you move what you're doing forward. You can also use them to actually connect different people in the business that have similar and shared interests, but who would not otherwise cross paths. And you can also use that community practise to help you with developing your collateral, developing your policies, developing your plans. It's like an automatically engaged feedback loop of the people who might be impacted by change so allowing them to be able to influence and add to what you were doing will ultimately help you when it comes to implementing that change because they're already on board. They've been part of the journey; they've seen it develop and they've been engaged already. So yeah, it can definitely help with how change gets embedded.
RC

And are there any kind of instances where perhaps they've not engaged the full team on the business side? I mean to me, I think that understanding that the impact and being linked to what the business wants to achieve sometimes gets lost in the process of trying to do projects and programmes. What are your thoughts on that, Maria?

MC
That can definitely be a risk, certainly within IT projects, engaging the right people and making sure that all business areas that are affected are represented somehow. But I think you can only take that so far and sometimes you can take that too far, even. There is an element of wanting to communicate with everybody, but then you've got to draw a line somewhere, right? I'm thinking about a data maturity assessment I completed where the business wanted lots of people engaged on it, which is fine, but it took four times as long to complete the assessment as it would usually take me at other client organisations. It's great to have that engagement and buy in, but we need to all be aware that is does come at a cost and will slow things down.
And attitude is also important. As long as people are engaging in a constructive and collaborative way and not just including more people who want to throw up barriers of resistance and keep you in a loop of review and re-review. Ultimately, as long as you've got the people who are heading up the impacted functions on board, then they should be able to input into change programmes and lead their teams toward the chosen direction. So again, it's about getting the balance right.
RC

OK, cool. So anything else? Any other points as we've been talking that come to mind that we should just touch on?

MC
Probably around risk management. I see that's not often held as strongly as it could or should be in some of the more strategic programmes that are going on. Many organisations don't have a corporate risk management approach, so you've got all these risk registers in different projects and nothing's really connected. So, it's really difficult sometimes to understand what the risk landscape actually is. And almost all programmes end up being delayed for one reason or another, and unanticipated risk is most often one of those key reasons for delays. What I see happening mostly is let's get some quick wins in let's do the easy stuff first, so we can show some progress and show some benefit to help get traction, which makes sense on the face of it.
But the problem is, if you defer the riskier things, then you're just storing up problems for the future. It's more of a philosophical thing, but IBM developed this methodology called rational unified process. And it advocates that you identify the hardest bits, the riskiest bits, and do those first which fights against our natural inclination to tackle the easy things first, which will then likely cause delays later in a change programme. By doing the hardest thing first, you significantly de-risk the remainder of the change activity and safeguard end delivery dates.
RC

YesI get it. It's a good point, though. The kind of balance to be struck between the desire to make an impact with the transformation programme and what are the longer term aims and stay the course… it's so easy to get into that mind of how we get to the quick wins, how do we get to the benefits quickly? When really a lot of transformation is about fundamental change in the way you're doing things today to what you want to be doing tomorrow and what your organisation should look like tomorrow. I think people lose the fact that you need to invest and that's not just about money, but it's people's time. You know, the organisational time, the focus of the organisation and even though people set them up as programmes, still a lot of the people end up doing it side of desk. They don't dedicate themselves to being involved in it. So that investment is kind of lacking. And that's because people don't think about the big things that they need to do. That they need to address. So yeah, I get it. Good point. Thanks so much Maria.

MC
My pleasure!

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