Change Management: Why Technical Success Still Isn't Enough

The Horváth study of 200 executives points at a related but distinct failure mode: three- quarters of respondents said the selection and availability of project managers and staff didn't receive adequate attention before the project started, and 78% said too many objectives were treated as equally important, with nothing meaningfully sequenced or prioritized. Both findings describe the same underlying problem from different angles — organizations underinvesting in the human side of program setup relative to the technical side, and then being surprised when the human side is what determines the outcome.

One ASUG respondent, quoted anonymously in the research, described delaying go-live for more than a year specifically because risks like change management, external-resource dependencies, testing and business-process documentation weren't addressed early enough. Another described the difficulty more plainly: “we have some basic needs but getting alignment on overall business benefit is difficult.” That is not a technology problem. It is an organizational-alignment problem wearing a technology project's clothing.