Executive Education Program

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Transformation programs in crisis
Identifying causes and correcting course

Diagnosis and recovery at program level

Duration: 1 day (open enrollment); 2 days (in-house)

Format: In-person; open enrollment or in-house. Groups of 10 to 15. Not recorded. Method-neutral and system-independent. The two-day in-house version works on the client’s own program.

Target audiences

• CIO
• Program managers
• PMO leaders
• Sponsors from executive management and finance
• Senior interim and consulting working within client programs

Problem and relevance
Large IT and transformation initiatives rarely fail suddenly. An ERP migration, a core-system replacement, a post-merger integration slips gradually while status reports stay green until the second delay is due and no one can say what is actually true. Typical settings: S/4HANA rollouts, core-system replacements, carve-outs and post-merger integrations, cloud and platform migrations, NIS2 remediation plans. Many SAP migrations overrun time and budget, with governance and steering often proving more decisive than technical difficulty. The course focuses on how to regain control and steer the program back on course.

Learning outcomes and benefits

What you will take away

• The typical cause patterns of failed IT programs and their early indicators
• Which control artifacts are reliable and which routinely create a misleading picture
• The difference between symptom, cause, and trigger
• The role of program organization, governance, and supplier steering in how a crisis forms
• The four options: adjust, reset, reduce, or stop

What you will be able to do

• Assess a program’s state in a structured way within a few days
• Estimate remaining effort and schedule realism independently of the existing plan
• Present findings so they hold before executive management, the committee, and the supplier
• Derive causes with evidence, instead of naming culprits
• Prioritize immediate measures and estimate their effect

Topics and content
The day follows the sequence of a real program review: gather, diagnose, assess, and defend. Method-neutral for classic, agile, and hybrid initiatives; ERP programs feature as the leading example.

How programs slide into crisis

• Gradual, not sudden; early indicators and why they are missed
• Why status reports stay green: reporting chains, optimism bias, incentives

Gathering the situation reliably

• Which artifacts are meaningful: baseline, change requests, minutes, contracts, test reports
• Which can systematically mislead: percentage completion, traffic lights, and nominal resource plans
• Interview technique: whom first, what not to ask

Causes

• Six recurring cause patterns: unclear scope, missing decision-making, understaffing, supplier steering, architecture, and governance
• Separating symptom, cause, and trigger

Remaining effort and deliverability

• Why the existing plan cannot be the basis
• Bottom-up estimate of remaining effort; completion measured by result, not by effort
• Checking schedule realism against reference classes

Options and immediate measures

• The four options with preconditions and cost: adjust, reset, reduce, stop
• Measures that work versus measures that only reassure

Defending findings

• Building a defensible report: facts, findings, evidence, conclusions
• Arguing before committee, executive management, and supplier
• What makes a program assessment defensible as an expert opinion

In-house only: contract and governance

• What the contract reveals about steerability; change orders as an early indicator
• Roles, decision paths, and reporting quality in one’s own house

Methods
Roughly 30 percent presentation to 70 percent participant activity.

• Work on real, anonymized program documents (e.g., status reports, plans, change requests, minutes) reading out what is evidenced and what is merely claimed
• Group work: cause analysis, weighing options, prioritizing immediate measures, with plenary review
• The “defend a finding” role exercise: presenting to a simulated steering board and being questioned
• Peer exchange on early warning signs seen or missed in one’s own initiatives. Confidentiality and no recordings
• Individual work: one-minute papers and transfer to one’s own initiative

The distinctive approach

• Transformation-level diagnosis and IT scope, rather than conventional project-level recovery
• Independent remaining-effort estimation using empirical distributions and reference-class forecasting
• Defending findings before a steering board and suppliers; participants leave with a structured assessment grid

Prerequisites

• Practical experience in project or program work, roughly from two to three years upward
• Basic project-management knowledge assumed, certification is not required
• Helpful: one’s own current or completed initiative as a reflection case

Course lead: Dr. Christof Gellweiler, author of the IT Alignment Guide V2 and Strategic Analysis in Practice; 30 years in IT and transformation

Scheduling and delivery: Via selected seminar providers. In-house on request.