I’ll admit it: I’m a non-techy technology enthusiast. If that sounds like a contradiction, it probably is. I’m not a developer, I don’t write code for a living, and I have no interest in being the smartest person in the room about any given tool. But I do get excited about what good technology can do for a business, and this last week was no exception. It also reminded me, again, why so many technology change projects fail to meet expectations.
I’d spent the week with one of my favourite clients, in one of my favourite cities. The work has been varied: some light no-code tinkering to take the friction out of how their systems talk to each other, some hands-on training, and some coaching around how their people can get more from the toolset they already own. Most of it was unglamorous. All of it was useful.
The week ended with something more eye-catching. I sat in on a workshop with the client’s core system vendor, who is rapidly building generative and agentic AI tools into the stack. The demos were impressive. The pitch was that everything is designed to be deployed easily, with minimum fuss. It’s the sort of session that gets a room of senior people really interested.
And that’s the part that needs careful handling.
The problem with brilliant demos
Vendor demos are designed to show the software at its best. That’s their job. The question isn’t whether the technology is impressive, because it nearly always is now. The question is whether it solves a problem you actually have.
This isn’t a new tension. It’s been a failure mode of corporate IT for the last forty years. The industry-wide figure is that around 75% of business and IT projects fail to fully meet expectations, and that number hasn’t shifted in decades. Plenty of those projects involved good technology. Plenty of them involved talented people. They still didn’t deliver the value the board was promised.
The conversation that stopped a team leader in her tracks
I had a conversation this week with a team leader who was keen to start deploying AI agents into her work. She wanted to know what was available and how to get started. My first question was the one I always ask:
“What problem are you wanting to solve?”
She stopped and thought, but she couldn’t name anything specific.
That isn’t a criticism of her. She’s bright, committed, and curious, which is exactly what you want in someone leading change. The reason she couldn’t answer is that the question is rarely asked early enough. The momentum in most organisations runs the other way. A vendor brings the tool, a department gets excited, a budget appears, and the search for a problem worth solving comes much later, if it comes at all.
This is the danger with any shiny new technology, whether it’s AI-enabled or not. The solutions look great. They’re often designed to solve a generic problem, or someone else’s problem, or a problem the vendor finds interesting. None of which has anything to do with what’s currently moving the needle in your business.
I want to be clear: the vendor I sat with this week deserves credit. The functionality is genuinely impressive and the development pace is serious. But impressive isn’t the same as aligned. You can buy something excellent and still find, six months later, that nothing on your P&L has moved.
How technology change projects actually deliver value
The shortest definition I can offer is this:
Real value from technology comes from solving the problems you currently have, in ways that will directly move your top line up, or your cost base down. Everything else is interesting.
Interesting is fine. Interesting can even be the right call, as long as you know that’s what you’re buying. The trouble starts when interesting gets dressed up as transformational, and the board signs off expecting one thing while the organisation delivers another.
This is the territory that the Business Value Maximisation Framework, BVMF®, was built for. It’s been developed over more than 30 years by David Jacobs of MaxVal Consultancy and is now licensed to BVMF Ltd. It is where I recently started to qualify as a Business Value Maximisation Specialist (BVMS).
The framework isn’t a methodology you bolt on top of PRINCE2, Agile or whatever else you’re using. It sits underneath them, focused entirely on whether the work is actually generating value, and giving you the models, questions and discipline to keep that honest.
Why I’m building a coaching service around this
For most of my consulting career, I’ve been brought in to lead or assure projects. That’s still work I enjoy. But the more I see, the more I’m convinced that the highest leverage point is earlier than that.
It’s in the conversations before the budget is signed off. It’s in the question that nobody around the table is quite senior enough, or quite independent enough, to ask.
That’s why I’m launching a BVMF-based coaching service for senior leaders, sponsors and service providers running technology-enabled change. My service is designed for people who are technically capable of running the project themselves but who recognise that a calm, independent voice in the right meetings can be the difference between a 75% chance of disappointment and a 75% chance of success.
It’s part-time. It’s deliberately undramatic. And it starts with one question:
What problem are you actually trying to solve?
This is the first post in a five-part series on how leaders can move their technology change projects from a 75% chance of disappointment to a 75% chance of success. The next instalment looks at what actually goes wrong in the gap between vendor promise and delivered value.
Where to start
If you’d like to have that conversation, the best place to start isn’t a meeting. It’s a short, practical guide I’ve put together for senior leaders and sponsors who want to get this right from the outset.
It’s called the 3-Step Guide to Delivering Successful Change, and it walks through the questions I’d want you to answer before any vendor demo, any budget paper, or any project kick-off.
If, after reading it, you’d like to talk through how it applies to what you’re working on, there’s an option to book a free coaching call directly from the confirmation page. No pressure, no script, just a conversation. If you prefer, you can contact me here.
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