MSc consulting project Completed
Change management in a digital transformation
A Swiss public institution was digitalising its finance and reporting processes, but the change was stalling. Through stakeholder interviews we found why, and recommended how to manage the next phase.
Why is a technically progressing digital transformation not taking hold in daily work, and what should the organisation do next?
Key findings
- The transformation was moving forward technically, with new systems, reporting, budgeting and automation, and employees did not reject the change itself.
- It was weakened by an unclear shared vision, silo thinking, fragmented communication and uneven leadership support.
- New digital tools had been introduced without mapping how people actually worked, so staff kept manual fallback steps running alongside the new system.
- Change overload and a weak error culture made people hide problems instead of fixing them.
- The core finding: this was not a technical implementation problem but an organisational change problem.
How we did it
The situation
A Swiss public institution was digitalising its finance and reporting processes: new systems, automated reporting, new budgeting tools. On paper the programme was on track. In daily work, it was not taking hold. Our job as a student consulting team was to find out why, and what the organisation should do in the next phase.
This is a classic consulting question: the client knows something is wrong, but not what. The first task is to turn a vague feeling into a precise diagnosis.
How we diagnosed it
We chose semi-structured interviews of 60 to 75 minutes with employees in different roles. Structured enough to compare answers, open enough to follow what people raised themselves. To avoid seeing only what we expected, we analysed every interview against four established change management frameworks:
| Framework | What it asks | What it revealed here |
|---|---|---|
| Lewin’s change model | Has the organisation unfrozen old habits, changed, and refrozen the new way? | The change phase was running, but nothing was refreezing: people kept old manual steps “just in case” |
| McKinsey 7S | Do strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills fit together? | Systems moved ahead, while structure, shared values and leadership style lagged behind |
| Kotter’s 8 steps | Is there urgency, a guiding team, a vision, communication and visible quick wins? | No shared vision and one-way communication, so quick wins stayed invisible to staff |
| Schein’s culture model | What unwritten assumptions shape behaviour? | A weak error culture: people hid problems instead of raising them early |
We then coded each interview and combined the codes into master themes across all interviews. The most important pattern only appeared in that comparison: every group described the same gap between the new system and the way work was really done, just from different sides.
What we found
The transformation was not failing technically. It was failing organisationally: new digital tools had been introduced without mapping how people actually worked, so staff kept manual fallback steps running alongside the new system.
This matches what John Kotter found in his ten-year study of more than 100 companies attempting major change: transformations rarely fail because of the plan itself, but because of missing urgency, a weak guiding coalition, an unclear vision and, most often, under-communication. Kotter estimated that leaders under-communicate the vision by a factor of ten. Our interviews heard the same thing: updates on the intranet, but no real two-way conversation.
What we recommended
- A clear transformation roadmap, so employees understand the direction and the order of the changes.
- Cross-functional process ownership, to break silos where one process touches several departments.
- A communication loop, replacing one-way intranet updates with regular two-way feedback.
- Leadership and error culture: learning reviews after milestones that ask what worked, what did not and what to adjust, without blaming individuals.
- A realistic implementation timeline that avoids change overload.
Why this project changed how I think
The strategy made sense on paper. The value was lost in the gap between the plan and daily operations. Since this project, I look at every transformation with one question:
Does this change actually remove work, or does it just move it somewhere less visible?
It is the question I want to spend my career answering for clients.
Confidentiality
The client’s name and the full report stay confidential. I am happy to talk about the method and the learnings in person.
