Nine actions leaders can take to safeguard large multi-year transformations

Irrespective of the sector in which they operate, C-suite leaders and non-executive directors often embark upon large transformation programs with great optimism—and that’s understandable. After all, they are driving once-in-a-generation changes that can enable an organisation to become what it aspires to be. The potential upsides are enticing, usually including a genuine step change in both technology and organisational capability. As well as modernising systems and processes, these large transformation programs can reinvent business models, empower and upskill people, and ensure long-term sustainability and competitiveness.

However, these potential rewards come with their own set of risks. Large transformation programs are incredibly complex with multi-year timeframes. Not only do they come with a hefty price tag, but they also immerse leaders and their people into an extended period of ambiguity. Early optimism can soon wane when unexpected or competing priorities emerge, technology evolves, business models need to scale, stakeholder scrutiny ramps up, workforce productivity dips, and change fatigue creeps in.

So how is it that some program leaders are blighted by these issues, while others find ways to detect, mitigate and ultimately overcome them? Pretty much every program begins with good intentions and involves hard work, so why are some programs safely delivered while others derail?

Informed by a recent successful large-scale, multi-year transformation at a large private health insurer, we recommend several proven actions that C-suite leaders and non-executive directors can take to embed change and business readiness as a core driver of transformation success. Each one involves a step away from traditional, linear project thinking and a step towards more flexible, risk-informed approaches that sustain stakeholder buy-in from start to finish.

Traditional technology-led development lifecycle frameworks follow a linear structure of design, build, test and deploy—but larger transformation programs (with multiple deployment stages) are less neat and discreet. The risk landscape continuously evolves, and the way people experience each transformation phase differs across the organisation too.

Project phases ebb and flow, scale differently, and don’t align precisely with structured technology timelines. People have varying levels of knowledge and comfort with transformation programs, but leaders must maintain everyone’s engagement—even when timelines shift and pressure escalates. 

Solutions: 

Large transformations often start with a solid foundation of proven frameworks and detailed planning, but success depends on quickly evolving to the shifting needs of both the business and the program itself. Leaders should prioritise adaptability over rigid adherence to traditional business adoption or change management models.

This requires moving beyond linear, one-size-fits-all sequencing. Instead, timing and interventions must be tailored to each business division’s unique capacity to engage a critical approach during multi-year transformations.

A deep, practical understanding of the plan enables regular reassessment of which preparation activities are essential, and which can flex. Providing ongoing coaching and support helps build change leadership capability and capacity for change, ultimately generating momentum and maximising adaptability.

Constant ‘what if’ modelling and contingency planning become central to the program’s approach. This allows the project team to anticipate delays, evaluate trade-offs, and pivot quickly when technical delivery timelines shift. Scaling efforts to match organisational capacity—and resisting the temptation to follow a rigid, linear plan—becomes pivotal to the success of the program.

All change carries some level of risk and the larger the change, the greater the scale and variety of risk. For large transformation programs, leaders are typically concerned with delivery risk (such as scope, budget and time; all accepted to achieve objectives) along with the delivered risk introduced during and after the implementation. 

With a go-live date looming, organisations that seek to significantly reduce every single risk can become frozen with indecision. Leaders can only execute with confidence when they have a crystal-clear view of the associated risks and interdependencies.

Solutions: 

Transformation isn’t always a choice—legacy systems and shifting market forces often make it a necessity. In these moments, leaders must resist the urge to chase perfection or attempt to eliminate all risk. The real skill lies in knowing when to act.

Risk appetite must be defined upfront, with the understanding that acceptable risk thresholds—within tolerance of the organisation’s risk appetite—will evolve over the life of a program. Risk shouldn’t be a side issue, but instead the backbone of the approach, supported by ongoing dialogue and reassessment. Creating a clear ‘red thread’ linking strategic risk appetite, organisational risk frameworks, and delivered program risk, gives the board and executive visibility over how their cumulative decisions shape both transformation outcomes and business-as-usual operations.

Work with stakeholders to define readiness thresholds—a practical compass for what matters most. These thresholds enable risk-based trade-offs when capacity is tight, ensuring the most critical, high-impact activities stay on track.

Data also plays a pivotal role. Organisations continuously measure employee preparedness through formal surveys, informal forums, and robust readiness criteria. These insights help tailor engagement and support, meaning that change management becomes more than just a ‘soft skill’—it’s tangible and measurable too. When go-live decisions are needed, leaders have a clear, evidence-based view of the risks and trade-offs. 

Large transformation programs are not for the faint-hearted. They require leaders and workforces to step outside their comfort zones—accepting additional risks, taking on new responsibilities, and working in uncertainty. Without careful management, such uncertainty can create echo chambers that employees fill with speculation and negative assumptions. During this extended period of flux, organisations must also continue to deliver for customers. It can be notoriously difficult for a program’s change teams to maintain optimism and clear messaging while having honest, transparent conversations about real challenges and setbacks.

Solutions: 

Leaders need to deliver consistent, optimistic messaging with honesty and integrity. ‘Communications should be people-centric, pragmatic, and positive, acknowledging that perfection at go-live is often unrealistic.’ The emphasis is on building confidence—especially among frontline teams—that robust support is in place to recover swiftly from initial challenges.

Throughout a program’s duration, employee communications should clearly explain how each stage and action contributes to the overall objectives (the ‘strategy why and what’) as well as the desired outcomes (the ‘execution why’).

This narrative is consistently reinforced by both formal and informal leaders who hold strong influence across the organisation. By keeping these leaders regularly informed and engaged, they are empowered to act as credible change agents, leveraging their networks to secure widespread buy-in. In any multi-year transformation, personnel changes are inevitable, and maintaining consistent messaging requires embedding communication mechanisms within program governance.

Transparency is integral and can include open forums for candid questions and regular employee updates woven into existing team rhythms. Open dialogue with key audiences should remain active throughout every phase, while progress is carefully measured and reported to provide clear, tangible evidence of advancement. Business teams can be invited to pilot new systems in sandbox environments and trial learning approaches, giving them a voice in shaping solutions. Workforce sentiment should also be monitored closely, enabling the Business Adoption team to address concerns with targeted change interventions grounded in real experience.

In large-scale transformations, frontline teams are at the sharp end. Like everyone else, they face the uncertainty of change—but they also bear the brunt of customer feedback when things go wrong. And in highly structured environments like branches and call centres, where every minute is accounted for, absorbing additional training or change activities can be challenging.

Solutions: 

Frontline employees can either be powerful advocates or reluctant hostages in the change journey. A guiding principle is to meet employees where they are. Embed team members with frontline teams before, during, and after launch, respecting existing commitments while capturing real-time insights from the ground. This approach builds trust and opens early, honest conversations about upcoming changes. Frontline teams become active contributors to solutions, feeling valued, prepared and heard.

To deepen support, each change manager can be assigned a stakeholder portfolio for a business division. This gives stakeholders a trusted go-to person and allows change managers to tailor communications, previews, sandbox practice and bespoke training to each team’s needs (including frontline users, administrators and technology teams). Learning journeys should be role-based and crafted to reflect the customer experience and frontline engagement. 

Transparency and alignment are further reinforced at organisation-wide Q&A forums aligning between front and back-office teams.

Detailed change impact analyses help identify where new processes will add manual effort. These insights enable frontline teams to allocate resourcing and prepare for go-live. Various tools can be harnessed to forecast productivity dips and plan for upskilling. These can include workforce impact registers to capture changes to handling times and workload assignment, short-term adoption curve modelling, and a workforce planning framework to forecast and prepare for customer call and processing volumes.

Crucially, support doesn’t stop at launch. A multifaceted hypercare model designed to help frontline teams resolve issues quickly while maintaining customer experience can include elements such as:

• Self-serve resources

• Embedded change champions

• A real-time communications channel for crowdsourced expert support.

This type of model fosters collective problem-solving and gives technical teams’ visibility into emerging issues. Its effectiveness has seen frontline teams transition to regular operations earlier than planned. 

When large transformation programs make headway, the baton will—at some point in time—need to be passed from project teams to business-as-usual operations. But picking the right moment can be tough. Ambiguity around risk tolerance and what constitutes an ‘acceptable performance level’ can cause hesitation among those who must eventually take ownership of new systems, processes, and organisational key performance indicators.

In the absence of clear, agreed expectations about the conditions required for handover, large transformation programs can be unnecessarily delayed. Disagreements over what constitutes ‘readiness’ can prevent a pragmatic transition from taking place.

Solutions: 

Operational readiness criteria and delivered risk measurements are defined from the outset. Working closely with executive and senior leaders, ensure that both program and business-as-usual teams share a clear understanding of the preconditions required for go-live. Transparent conversations with business teams clarify what ‘readiness’ means in practical terms. Leaders reinforce that go-live is not the finish line, and that not every criterion needs to be marked ‘green’. Amber ratings are acceptable, provided associated risks are understood and actively managed. This pragmatic stance helps focus attention on what matters most. 

The approach highlights the value of comprehensive readiness criteria, with clear thresholds spanning both technical and non-technical domains. Stage gates are established at key intervals to ensure those thresholds are met before implementation. As launch nears, risks are triaged and mitigated in order of priority.

A final learning during the go-live handover is that in-house leaders physically sign off on their understanding of the risk profile and operational readiness. This creates shared accountability and makes it incumbent on all leaders across the organisation to be fully informed and assured that their teams are prepared.

Large transformation programs encounter a variety of ‘wicked problems’ (i.e. complex, unfamiliar challenges with unclear boundaries) which don’t come with obvious solutions. When organisations lack sufficient frameworks for problem solving, teams struggle to measure progress, demonstrate competency, or build confidence among leaders. This makes it hard to quantify risk and ‘therefore to prioritise resources to address the problem.’

Traditional technology programs often have established measurements for technical ‘rollouts’ but may lack the same rigour for the business adoption aspects of a large transformation program. This can present leaders and other stakeholders with a mismatched view of actual progress because technical progress does not necessarily equate to wider business readiness.

Solutions: 

Structured methodologies are selected to navigate complex challenges, combining industry-standard frameworks (such as ADKAR and PROSCI) with bespoke approaches tailored to specific issues. By leveraging PwC’s cross-industry experience alongside deep business knowledge (often from clients), this strategy provides credibility, repeatability, and measurability, enabling the program to respond effectively to new or evolving business complexities.

A key learning is the importance of defining business adoption metrics upfront, not just technical ones. Comprehensive tracking of learning content development, completion and competency, end-to-end process readiness and mitigation of change impacts enables the team to predict outcomes and gives leaders a more complete picture of progress.

When new risks or impacts emerge, the team refers to consistent metrics and revisits their structured approach, adding or removing elements as needed. A systems-thinking approach allows new inputs to be integrated into a holistic view, helping leaders see how different components interact and where pressure points exist.

This approach enables leaders to identify which areas are truly mission critical and make informed, risk-based decisions about where to focus effort—ensuring that the highest effort is directed toward the highest-impact areas.

Early in the design phase, frameworks are socialised with reference groups across the organisation to validate the approach and secure buy-in. This ensures developers, testers, and stakeholders ‘speak the same language’ when discussing business capability needs—creating a strong foundation for confident, aligned decision-making throughout the transformation journey.

Large transformation programs reach into every corner of an organisation, beyond formally mapped relationships between different workstreams and components. There are often informal points in the process that don’t have clear ownership or logical homes within an organisation. These hidden areas can conceal risks, misalignment and capability gaps that can derail adoption, even when other workstreams appear well on track.

Traditional program management approaches focus on formal links and accountability structures, missing where certain responsibilities fall between the cracks. Unseen changes in one area can trigger unexpected consequences somewhere else.

Solutions: 

Leverage the Business Adoption team working in collaboration with business representatives to piece together system and manual junctions—mapping process handovers across teams, identifying informal touch points, and ensuring readiness for tasks performed in and outside systems. By surfacing and addressing these gaps early, the team reduces the risk of service disruption and strengthens confidence in the transition. There is value in conducting early systematic environmental scans to identify gaps between known workstreams.

The success of a transformation program relies on wide collaboration across business and technical teams. The Business Adoption team can become the lynchpin tightly coupled with the technology streams bridging disciplines, translating disparate data into meaningful business impacts, and clarifying wherever accountability is unclear.

The Business Adoption team can also actively monitor handover points and informal touchpoints, watching for any blind spots. This proactive approach allows leaders to resolve misalignments before they escalate. It also gives technical teams the confidence to focus on their scope, knowing the Business Adoption team is connecting the dots across the organisation.

End-to-end process testing and business continuity preparedness with high adaptability play a vital role. Rather than looking within individual systems, the teams should examine transitions between them—analysing what could go wrong, how that might impact strategic risk, and how that could affect both employees and customers. This holistic lens and risk-aware mindset help ensure a smoother changeover and a better experience for all involved.

Invariably, large transformation programs require the inhouse workforce to collaborate with external partners and specialists. A program’s success or failure can hinge upon the ability of these people to gel with one another quickly. Time and budget pressure exist from day one—and leaders want to ‘get runs on the board’ straight away. 

But mutual trust and understanding can be hard to instantly establish between inhouse and external partners. Employees are often juggling business-as-usual priorities along with intensive program activities, causing friction over decision-making authority, resource allocation and knowledge transfer.

Without the right foundations, the early phases of a program can be especially fraught with misunderstandings and miscommunication which undermines trust and relationships throughout the rest of the program.

Solutions: 

From the earliest phases of a transformation, leaders can set the tone by establishing clear governance frameworks. This means defining assumptions, clarifying accountability, and backing it all with shared metrics, transparent communication, and clearly assigned roles.

These expectations apply equally to internal and external team members, with both PwC and client colleagues working to specific deliverables and using regular feedback to keep efforts aligned with key priorities.

Formal rating systems can be used to assess individual performance against role and program requirements. Routine conversations help surface issues early, enabling timely adjustments to team support, resource allocation, and overall performance across the integrated structure.

This gives leaders’ real-time visibility into team dynamics and individual contributions, allowing for open, informed conversations about capability needs. These reviews are especially valuable as the demands of the program evolve and so do the skills required to meet them.

Importantly, the feedback process also helps nurture emerging talent offering constructive guidance and development opportunities in the early stages of people’s careers.

Boards are the ultimate custodians of any organisation and they each carry a high level of corporate responsibility. Some organisations are fortunate to have credible technologists or at minimum ‘tech savvy’ directors amongst their Board, however, many others are not. Large transformation programs can be technologically complex, especially when capital investment has been redirected to other strategic priorities. This can be particularly problematic if boards have deferred approval of large transformations for some time. In the absence of relevant information, directors can make decisions with an incomplete understanding of the transformation risks, trade-offs and dynamics.

It can therefore be hard for program teams to bring boards of directors on the transformation journey. It’s important to provide the right level of information in way that gives the board a full appreciation of the risks and trade-offs involved, enabling them to make informed decisions.

Solutions: 

For executives and program leaders, a robust board education and communication strategy is essential because they have a pivotal role to play as high-profile change agents. The communications strategy must therefore prioritise frequency, transparency, and strategic alignment throughout the transformation.

Keeping senior stakeholders informed is paramount. The Business Adoption team can build confidence through demonstrating that challenges have been anticipated, and solutions have been thoroughly tested.

Preparation includes case studies helping the team learn from past transformations. Custom frameworks highlight risk profiles, milestone achievements, and upcoming challenges, giving the executive leadership team and Board a clear view of progress and priorities.

The Business Adoption team (in addition to program leadership) should proactively anticipate board-level questions and establish regular briefing cycles early on. Updates are delivered in clear, consistent language, avoiding unnecessary technical detail and ensuring directors understood the risk profile of every decision.

The use of Mock Day 1 simulations can help shape command centre activities to help maintain continuity after go-live. These can start out as small desktop exercises and scale to involve Executives and frontline employees. These stress tests provide leaders a safe space to trial triage resolution, transition planning and operational impact reporting.

Key external stakeholders, including regulators, should also be engaged throughout the program. This proactive communication builds trust and effective feedback loops, reducing the need for reactive enquiries and keeps momentum focused on delivery.

In conclusion, successfully navigating large multi-year transformations requires leaders to embrace a dynamic and holistic approach that goes beyond traditional project management. By prioritising adaptability, strategic risk management, clear and consistent messaging, and frontline engagement, organisations can foster business adoption at scale and maintain momentum amidst complexity and uncertainty. Equally important is the focus on connecting informal touchpoints, synchronizing efforts between internal teams and external partners, and cultivating board confidence through transparent and informed communication. These nine proven actions, drawn from the experience of a major private health insurer’s transformation journey, offer a practical blueprint for C-suite leaders and directors aiming to safeguard their own transformation initiatives. Ultimately, embedding change readiness as a continuous priority ensures that these ambitious, once-in-a-generation programs deliver lasting value, empower people, and set the foundation for sustainable future success.