This year, three separate clients have come to us with a similar story in their transformation programs. They technically delivered, were on budget, and on time, but stalled anyway. All 3 clients went on to request a project manager to help get their programs moving on track, but we noticed a detrimental issue in their requests. It was certain that they weren’t looking for the right person to complete the job, what they needed was not a PM, but a Business Change Consultant. BCCs are the best way to navigate towards a successful transformation program, especially when it’s an organization’s first time doing so. In this article, we’ll discuss the signs that 2mrw Group have noticed to indicate when a BCC is needed over a PM.
Transformation programs are increasing in popularity as businesses look to become more efficient and competitive. However, it is also common for companies to struggle to manage these programs appropriately, leading to them being stalled or delayed.
A common theme we have recognized amongst successful clients is that they can recognize when the addition of a Project Manager is needed. This is when the work required is primarily sequential, for example data migration, system configuration and integration testing. Here, success is measured by scope, schedule and cost.
These organizations had already been through similar changes before, so there was a clear line of tasks already in place. Governing the work wasn’t the problem, but execution was. The clients needed someone to ensure everything ran smoothly and efficiently, not someone to create new ideas, innovate and analyse. Therefore, their decision to bring another Project Manager onto the team was appropriate.
On the other hand, a theme we recognized amongst clients who faced a stall in their transformation programs was that Project Managers were added for the wrong scenarios. This was where success depended on the business changing daily behavior, instead of managing a routine that was already established. Moreover, multiple departments within the business had competing incentives or overlapping ownership, with nobody resolving who’d make the final decision amongst them.
It is crucial, in these cases, for a transformation program to recognize when a Business Change Consultant is needed instead of another PM.
The signs for this usually include training completion being high while data usage doesn’t move, indicating that employees were shown how to work, but not why, preventing them from understanding how the business was actually changing. Another sign is the same objection resurfacing from the same team time after time, indicating confusion about stakeholder impact and a misunderstanding of where the business’s priorities are heading. A further sign is a steering committee dominated by IT or leadership with no frontline voice represented, meaning the people most affected by the change have no way to flag problems before they escalate.
When an organization reaches this point without recognizing it, a multitude of mistakes usually follow. This can include measuring success only in delivery terms, like being on time or on budget, with no adoption or sentiment metric attached.
When hiring, an organization may also write a single job description that confuses PM and Change Manager duties, because they have yet to understand that these two roles solve two separate problems. The organization may let the PM’s engagement end once the change is made live, exactly when adoption risk peaks, or run multiple transformation initiatives across the same staff population, instead of managing the cumulative change fatigue this creates.
A further, quieter mistake is treating ‘training delivered’ as the same as ‘change adopted’, which risks employees struggling to assimilate the business’s changes and making errors that delay the organization’s success and efficiency.
This is why bringing in a Business Change Consultant is often the turning point for organizations in these situations, for a few specific reasons.
BCCs own stakeholder mapping before the first steering committee, so resistance is anticipated rather than reacted to. This allows the organization to respond effectively to issues as they arise, rather than after they’ve taken hold. Their mandate also explicitly includes the politics behind an organization: team restructuring and authority shifts that a PM can only escalate, not resolve.
They track adoption and sentiment as rigorously as a PM tracks scope and budget, so stalling metrics get caught at week 4, not month 6. And because they bring pattern recognition from other transformation programs, they can name a ‘shadow process’ or ‘change fatigue’ as a known failure mode, rather than treating each instance as a one off.
With a BCC in place, a business has the guidance of someone who knows what success looks like and can recognize the moment it starts to slip, supporting employees through the change itself, not just the delivery around it. Instead of spending time managing avoidable setbacks, that time goes toward building the outcome the transformation was meant to deliver in the first place.
This is exactly the gap 2mrw Group was built to close. We don’t just source candidates against a job title, we help clients work out which role their transformation program actually needs before a single CV is sent over. Every Business Change Consultant we put forward has already been through this exact scenario, spotting a stalled program, diagnosing whether it’s a delivery problem or an adoption problem, and having the mandate and experience to fix the right one.
If your transformation program is technically on track but not landing the way it should, it may be worth asking whether a PM is really what you need next. Get in touch with 2mrw Group and we’ll help you figure out the answer, and if it is a Business Change Consultant you need, we already have people ready who’ve solved this exact problem before.
Get in touch with us at: info@2mrwgroup.com.
