Pattern 1.15

The Shareholder Transformation

A change program whose only real patron is the investor, so it can succeed for shareholders while delivering little to anyone else.

In This Context

Boards sometimes launch transformations in response to market perceptions, and announcing one can be the point: the market responds and the share price rises. People inside the business are often unaware who the investors are, or why the program was signed off. The signal is a large program announced at board level with a headline figure, where no customers or internal users are asking for the change (and the supposed users may resist it), and the board is far removed from delivery.

The program’s success is judged by a market reaction, not by its output.
Delivery teams don’t know who they are really serving.

Therefore

Map the patrons before committing to the program (Map the Patrons). Find out who signed it off at board level, and why, and whether any customer or internal user is asking for what it will deliver.

Consequently

Teams understand what the program is actually for, and can judge it on those terms.
But if the only patron is the shareholder, the program may be shut down once the story has served its purpose.

Seen In

Chapter 11, figure “The $1 billion transformation, where shareholders were the only real patron”; also the bank in Chapter 14, sidebar “War Story: Engineering Targets as Negotiating Tools”, whose announced move of all its workloads to AWS became a bargaining chip in its negotiations with Microsoft.