Delivering the programme isn’t the same as delivering the outcome. The Value Gap
A 5-minute read for Senior Executives.
What we mean by The Value Gap
Fully charged vs low power.
Think of a transformation programme as a battery. The investment case defines its full charge, in effect, the revenue growth, cost reduction or capability uplift that the organisation is paying for. Delivery gets the battery built and connected. But building the battery is not the same as charging it. Too many transformations reach go- live with the programme live, the org chart redrawn and the new operating model documented but only partially charged. Adoption is patchy. Leaders talk about the change but don’t always visibly live it. Middle managers, still measured on old KPIs, quietly protect old ways of working. The capability to sustain the new model was never built. Within months, benefits tracking becomes an awkward, deprioritised task that nobody owns. The result: transformation delivered, value only partially realised. The Value Gap is the difference between the value promised in the business case and the value actually banked or realised. You’re not fully charged.
This gap can’t be seen on a programme dashboard, because programme dashboards measure delivery: scope, schedule, budget and risk. They were never designed to measure value realisation, which requires tracking behaviour, adoption and benefits long after the programme team has disbanded. Because it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed. It quietly leaks away throughout the transformation, one decision at a time, one behaviour at a time. Our experience across complex transformation programmes tells us that value rarely disappears because of technology. Instead, it leaks through predictable areas. Understanding them is the first step to closing the gap.
Every executive has lived this moment...
The business case promised £100m in benefits – greater productivity, lower operating costs, faster decisions, better customer outcomes. Whilst the programme absorbed the usual scars along the way – scope changes, slipped milestones, a business case revisited more than once – it got there: the programme went live, the technology was implemented, the new operating model was stood up, the steering committee moved on. 18-months later, when someone finally asks how much of that £100m was actually realised, the honest answer is: nobody really knows. This is not, in most cases, a failure of programme delivery. Even accounting for the usual turbulence, most large transformations do eventually reach go-live in a form the business recognises and accepts. The failure lies elsewhere – in the gap between what was delivered and what was actually put to work inside the organisation. It’s the proportion of transformation value that never reaches the organisation. We call this The Value Gap.
Delivering the programme isn’t the same as delivering the outcome
This paper sets out what The Value Gap is, why it opens up in even well-run transformations, and the five places where value most commonly leaks away before it ever reaches the P&L.
Programme delivered
CHECK-CIRCLE
👍
Value realised
👎
2
3
real change • real difference
“You brought a different dynamic to the leadership team; direct, honest, challenging and collaborative. You helped us evolve and we see you as trusted advisers.” Head of Customer Care Aviation sector
Value starts leaking before delivery even begins. How much value is leaking from your transformation?
Value Leak #1 Leadership Alignment: when leaders pull in different directions, the whole organisation feels it. Transformation begins long before implementation. And value begins leaking long before delivery has even started. Any transformation should begin with leaders creating a shared understanding of why change matters. In practice, programmes are frequently signed off by a sponsor group that agrees the business case in principle but never aligns on what the change actually means for how they, personally, will lead differently. Different executives carry different ideas of success, and those differences surface the moment the programme starts asking for trade-offs. When leaders are not genuinely aligned, the organisation receives mixed signals. One director talks about the change with conviction; another quietly hedges, protecting their team from disruption “just in case.” Employees are highly attuned to this ambiguity, and they take their cue from what they see and experience. Without visible, consistent leadership, people naturally default to familiar behaviours. Leadership isn’t governance or simply approving investment; it is behaviour that others choose to follow. Closing this leak means treating leadership alignment as a deliverable in its own right: a small group of senior sponsors who have worked through what the change truly means and costs them personally, agreed a single narrative, and are prepared to be visibly and consistently accountable for it from the first town hall to the last benefit realised.
4
5
real change • real difference
Value Leak #2 Middle Managers: they translate strategy into action and face into resistance. Without them, adoption will fail. If leaders set the direction, middle managers determine whether it actually happens. They translate strategy into action and stand at the coalface of resistance. They are the group most exposed by transformation – asked to deliver new outcomes, often with old KPIs, old resourcing and no additional time to lead their teams through the change. Many were never meaningfully consulted on the future state they are now expected to champion. Unsurprisingly, some become the programme’s most effective saboteurs – not through open resistance, but through quiet non-adoption: reverting to the old process “just for now,” protecting their team from extra workload, or simply not modelling the new behaviours because nobody is measuring whether they do. Value leaks here in a thousand small daily decisions, invisible to any programme dashboard. Closing this leak means equipping and incentivising middle managers as change agents, not just recipients of change. Giving them the tools, the time and a stake in the outcome, and measuring their teams on adoption of the new way of working, not just delivery of the old one.
"Resilience doesn't magically happen. You can't buy it. You have to consciously build resilience into the team. When people know how to deal with change, it stops feeling de-stabilising and starts feeling manageable. You can't just tell someone to be resilient, you have to put the systems in place that help them operate at their best." Becky Henderson-Hart Change Consultant, Project One
6
7
real change • real difference
Value Leak #3
Value Leak #4
Change Capability: operations start to falter when people are left to navigate change on their own. Most organisations have become highly capable at delivering projects. Far fewer have become equally capable at managing change. Many organisations still treat change management as a programme cost to be minimised rather than a capability that determines whether the investment pays back. Change resource is brought in late, scoped narrowly around communications and training, and released shortly after the technology goes live – precisely the point at which the hardest part of the work, sustained adoption, actually begins. This under-investment is rational in the short-term and expensive in the long-term. Communications and training build awareness and skill, but they don’t, on their own, build sustained new behaviour. Without genuine change capability embedded from design through to benefits realisation, organisations repeatedly re-learn the same lessons on every transformation, never building the muscle that would make the next one faster and cheaper. Closing this leak means resourcing change as a core capability, not an afterthought - engaged early enough to shape the design, skilled enough to work with data and behavioural insight, and retained long enough to see adoption become a habit, not a headline.
Benefits Ownership: if a benefit only exists on a business case slide, it’s unlikely to ever become reality. Business cases are built with precision and rigour in order for the programme to be approved. That same rigour rarely continues once delivery begins. Once a programme is underway, attention shifts to scope, schedule and budget; the benefits case is filed away for now. The deeper issue is ownership. Benefits are typically “owned” by a business case on a slide, and not by a named individual with the authority, incentive and accountability to actually realise them. When nobody owns a benefit, nobody actively drives its delivery. And when nobody owns a number, nobody is accountable when it doesn’t materialise. Closing this leak means naming a benefits owner for every material line in the business case, tracking realisation with the same discipline as budget and schedule. Benefits are operational outcomes that require clear ownership, measurement and ongoing intervention long after go- live. Whilst technology or infrastructure enables them; the business delivers them.
“To change your outcomes, you need to change what’s normal in the everyday behaviours. If you align culture to your transformation goals, it naturally pulls people towards that vision.”
Estelle Eades Client Partner, Project One
“Unlike many consultancy engagements where recommendations are left behind, this programme is actually delivering outcomes. The work is happening. The benefits are tangible. The results are measurable. It’s going very well.” Head of Environmental Management Defence sector
8
9
real change • real difference
“It’s not about standing up in a town hall necessarily, and giving a great speech. It’s just about those thousand little opportunities that you have every day
Value Leak #5
to reinforce behaviours.” Becky Henderson-Hart Change Consultant, Project One
Reinforcement: early adoption can disappear when support, coaching and leadership visibility fade. Go-live is not the finish line. It is the point at which value creation begins. The most common, and most avoidable leak happens after go-live. It’s when the programme team disbands, the change resource rolls off, and the organisation is left to sustain the new behaviours entirely on its own. Early adoption, often bolstered by hypercare support and residual enthusiasm, gradually fades. Without deliberate reinforcement, people drift back to what they know. This is a well-understood pattern in behavioural science: new habits need repeated reinforcement to become permanent, and organisations rarely plan for this beyond the first few weeks. Recognition, coaching and correction fade at exactly the moment they matter most, and the “new way of working” quietly becomes optional. Closing this leak means planning reinforcement as deliberately as go-live itself – sustained leadership visibility, recognition of the behaviours you want to see, and a mechanism to spot the drift and course correct for months, not weeks, after the programme formally closes. The organisations that realise the greatest returns don’t celebrate go-live; they reinforce the change until the new way simply becomes “the way we work.”
10
11
real change • real difference
Closing the gap None of these leaks will be surprising to any Exec who has sponsored a major change. And these five value leaks don’t represent every challenge an organisation will face, they represent the most common, the most preventable causes of unrealised transformation value. Close these leaks, and you won’t just deliver the programme, you’ll realise significantly more of the value you set out to achieve. The organisations that close The Value Gap do it by treating Change Management as the discipline that connects delivery to value. Engaged early, resourced properly, and sustained well past go-live, Change Management has the greatest impact on accelerating adoption and protecting return on investment.
real change • real difference
enquiries@projectone.com projectone.com
Next steps
The question worth asking of your next transformation is: how much of the value in the business case will you actually bank, and who specifically is accountable for making sure it happens? If any of these five leaks sound familiar, we can help you plug the leak. If you’d like to speak with one of our change experts or attend one of our exclusive roundtables to discuss this topic and share learnings with senior peers, please get in touch via theteam@projectone.com or register for the event via the QR code below.
12
13
Page 1 Page 2-3 Page 4-5 Page 6-7 Page 8-9 Page 10-11 Page 12-13Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs