Many technology investments fail not because of the technology itself, but because organizations underestimate the human and organizational investment required for success.
Your organization is your people and if they turn against the tech initiative, the tech initiative loses. Successful tech initiatives that rely on your organization should prioritize people, readiness, and change management—not just technical execution.
To achieve ROI, leaders must align teams, budgets, and governance around the human side of change.
Key Takeaways
- Frame it as a people-focused project, with less emphasis on the technology change. Executives need to reframe their perspective from the start and avoid the project being managed as a technical initiative.
- Appoint an executive-level project leader who understands the organization’s culture and people — not just someone with a tech background.
- Budget explicitly for change. Addressing change management underfunding is a common concern, though beyond this, from start to finish the project should allocate budget to meet practical needs such as backfilling roles, and more broadly, to gain the organization’s support for the change.
- Contracting flexibility matters. Fixed-price contracts work for pure tech deployments, but when people and processes are involved, rigid contracts drain ROI and create blind spots.
- Activate employees early and consistently. Show vocal and transparent support for the change at a management level, including designating change representatives across departments to improve adoption and address roadblocks throughout, not just training people at the end.
- Balance tech progress with people progress. Technology implementations almost always race ahead of human readiness. Leaders need to actively monitor and rebalance both tracks throughout the project.
The more a technology investment impacts people and processes, the greater the potential value — and the greater the risk.