The ‘Project’ is over. Welcome to the age of continuous transformation

Spending two years on a technology solution that’s already outdated by go-live isn’t just frustrating, it’s a sign that the traditional ‘project’ model is fundamentally broken. Your organization is left exhausted; budgets are drained and the business improvements you have been shown in the sales cycle fail to materialize or do not align with the current market conditions. Everyone simply wants to get back to normal operations. However, normal’ never returns as the next critical project, integration, AI challenge or mandatory evergreen upgrade is already around the corner and you think ‘here we go again’.

The Myth of the Traditional Project

Let’s face it, the traditional way of doing technology projects is rapidly becoming a dangerous myth. The reality is that technology, market and customer demands are constantly changing and the pace of change will only accelerate with AI. Transformation is no longer a singular event contained in an individual project. It represents a state of being for your entire organization captured in a continuous flow of initiatives that are nimble and can quickly adapt to changes in the environment.

For many years now I have seen the traditional approach wreak havoc on organizations. While trying to ensure success leaders set themselves up for failure in the long run.

• Organizational burnout: They assign their most knowledgeable people to the project, but as the reality of the project sets in they get into the squeeze. The amount of time invested in the project spirals upwards, way beyond vendor projections, while on the other hand the demands of the normal day-to-day business never slack off. Creating an organizational burnout that inevitably erodes the project’s outcomes.
• Groundhog Day: Many organizations approach every project from scratch. There is a constant reinvention of project governance, reporting and communication patterns. Leaving your organization open to making the same mistakes and relearning the same political lessons repeatedly. You never build organizational memory.
• Outdated Strategic decisions: approaching technology projects in the traditional way always leaves you behind, constantly being forced to react to change at great cost and organizational effort instead of being able to proactively drive change. Instead of celebrating project success you are forced to contemplate how your next project can help you to catch up.

Building Transformational Muscle Memory

In today’s world the goal of a leader is no longer to manage projects as drivers of individual outcomes. The goal is to embed transformational muscle memory permanently into the organization to enable outcomes to flow between initiatives and adapt based on your vision of the future. Building this muscle memory requires:

• A permanent lightweight governance framework that can be applied to any new initiative.  
• A culture of empowered teams where people no longer identify themselves by their role but see themselves as trained expert knowledge contributors who are ready to embark on any project.
• A repeatable playbook for aligning strategic initiatives, managing vendors and objectively measuring value. Once you have this muscle memory in place change isn’t a crisis it’s a straightforward rehearsed adaptation. Keeping you firmly at the driver’s wheel.

The New Leadership Mandate

The real test of modern-day leaders is no longer to survive from one big initiative to another, or from one project to the next. The real test is that they can build an organization that is able to thrive on continuous change.

Is your organization simply surviving from project to project or is it being architected to thrive in this era of accelerating continuous transformation?