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• Kick off product marketing plans to establish the brand and continu-

ously grow it to gain a competitive advantage.

• Close the programme by providing communication to all stakeholders

on success achieved, business value gained, success stories and lessons

learnt throughout the execution lifecycle.

• Incorporate all feedback and lessons learnt into the next business case

of transformational initiatives.

Recommendations

In my 21+ years of experience within software houses, consulting firms and

financial institutions, I have found many strategic programmes being failed

over the budget and having the deliverables outcome not fit for purpose.

The strategic programmes failed after consuming substantial time and

resources of the organisation. Delivering a product that does not deliver

any business value as expected has an impact on not only the financial cost

but also organisation competitiveness.

The main impact is also through opportunity cost for an organisation as

the time and resources could have been used to deliver strategic outcomes

required to gain competitive advantages. Failure on the strategic outcomes

also impact the company’s brand image, losing the existing customers, lack

of new market share, wastage of significant budget and staff turnover.

Hence it is important to run the programmes effectively and with care.

The following are some of the recommendations to assist in improving the

programme success rate of hitting the delivery of the products on time and

within the budget.

• Establish a team that has appropriate skills and willingness to deliver

the milestones.

• Every team member should understand the end result of the deliver-

able and how it will contribute to the organisation’s strategy. Everyone

in the programme team must understand the value she or he will be

creating to the organisation’s vision and mission by delivering their

milestones.

• Hire external consulting company or experts if the internal employ-

ees’ skills are lacking to deliver the programme.

• Establish a training programme to uplift the skills of employees that

will be part of the programme to deliver strategic outcomes.

• Communication is the key. All deliverables and how they will align

to the company’s strategy must be communicated to all stakeholders,

who are or not part of the programme. There will be stakeholders

who might just use the outcomes of the programme and some who are

actively involved in delivering the outcomes.

• Establish the programme in an agile delivery mode. An agile method-

ology has multiple benefits. Rather than delivering the whole project

as per the waterfall methodology, an agile methodology provides a