Henk van Huyssteen

Associate Director – Deloitte Consulting

Olympic optimism, digital dreams – staying grounded to avoid digital transformation failure

30 October 2023, 11:25

Henk has led complex business-technology programmes for 25 years. He is often called on to rescue projects in trouble, where this experience enables quick diagnoses of planning gaps, with solutions for systemic performance and delivery bottlenecks. He leads both Deloitte Africa Consulting's Major Programmes practice as well as its internal Delivery Excellence function. The former offers client services in programme leadership, lean portfolio management, Agile transformation, programme assurance and rescue. The latter supports the excellence of Deloitte's client delivery teams with methods, tools, and learning.

Businesses place their futures in the digital transformation basket. It is alarming then that on the worst offender list for cost and time overruns, IT transformations are ranked close to initiatives as notorious as Olympic Games preparations. A closer look reveals that digital transformation initiatives have surprisingly similar vulnerabilities to the readying of a city to host the Olympic Games. When we explore why these are so often overlooked and underplayed, we can counter-act each with execution strategies that give organisations the best chance of achieving their transformation aspirations.