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Telecom transformations can be compromised before vendor selection when leaders have not agreed on the business problem, the intended impact, the future operating model, or who has authority to make decisions. Technology matters, but selecting a platform cannot resolve those questions on its own.
Why can a transformation go wrong before technology is chosen?
Modernizing networks, customer systems, or other legacy platforms can feel like a concrete place to start. But a procurement decision is only useful if it supports a shared transformation goal. Without agreement on what the business needs to change, a program can deliver a system that works as specified while missing the outcomes that justified the investment.
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That is not an argument against technology. Boston Consulting Group notes that legacy systems can constrain innovation and responsiveness. Its point is that technology is one part of a larger change: leaders also need clarity about project scope, sourcing strategy, operating model, and business impact. BCG’s Five Recipes for Failure in a Telco Transformation (February 9, 2024) identifies five organizational pitfalls that can take hold before or alongside implementation.
Which organizational pitfalls can undermine the program?
1. Treating separate projects as the whole transformation
Individual initiatives may each have plausible goals yet fail to add up to a coherent change in how the operator competes or serves customers. BCG’s warning against missing the big picture points to a basic test: can leaders explain how the projects connect to the intended business impact, rather than only describing their technical deliverables?
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2. Bringing the business in too late
If business leaders join after the scope and solution are largely set, the program risks solving a technology-defined problem instead of one grounded in customer, employee, or commercial needs. BCG argues that the business side is a natural source of insight about scope and impact, and that it often becomes involved too late. IT remains essential, but it needs to work with business owners early enough to shape the change.
3. Applying agile only in name
Calling a project agile does not create the roles, capabilities, decision practices, and supporting processes required for teams to work that way. BCG lists partial agile adoption as a failure pattern. The practical issue is whether the operating conditions let teams coordinate and adapt, not whether the program uses agile terminology.
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4. Rewarding functional targets while expecting cross-functional results
A transformation that depends on cooperation can be weakened by incentives that reward each unit for its own goals. In a 2024 assessment of more than 90 major telcos and 30 consumer technology companies, McKinsey and Russell Reynolds Associates reported that 90 percent of interviewed C-suite leaders believed their organizations already had a cross-functional approach. Yet the study reported that 45 percent of management-by-objectives incentives were tied to functional or business-unit goals, compared with only 15 to 20 percent tied to cross-functional goals. These are findings reported for the study’s assessed companies and interviewed leaders, not a statistic about every telecom operator.
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When no central group can see dependencies across initiatives and help resolve bottlenecks, programs can compete for people, budgets, or leadership attention. BCG identifies the absence of a transformation control tower as another early pitfall. A reporting team that tracks status but cannot help coordinate or escalate decisions may not be enough.
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What should leaders settle before choosing technology?
Before comparing platforms or vendors, leaders should work through a short sequence of decisions. The order matters: technology selection should follow agreement about the change it is meant to enable.
- Agree on the ambition and outcomes. State what should change for the business and its customers or employees. Distinguish those outcomes from the systems or features that may help achieve them.
- Name the business owners and IT partners. Assign accountable business leaders to define needs and intended impact, with IT involved in shaping viable technical options. Make clear who decides when objectives or constraints conflict.
- Set the scope and dependencies. Define what is included, what is outside the program, and which other initiatives, processes, or capabilities depend on it. Use that scope to inform sourcing choices rather than letting a supplier proposal define the transformation by default.
- Align incentives and decision rights. Check whether leaders and teams are rewarded for the outcomes that require them to work together. Specify who can approve trade-offs, change priorities, and resolve cross-functional disagreements.
- Choose enabling technology and sequence the work. Once the business and operating questions are defined, evaluate technology against the capabilities and outcomes required. Plan related changes as an integrated effort, not simply as separate projects delivered one after another.
How should a telecom transformation be orchestrated?
McKinsey’s A blueprint for telecom’s critical reinvention (April 28, 2021) cautions against relying on sequential, largely siloed programs with a central team focused only on reporting and tracking. Its alternative is integrated change over a coordinated period, supported by a central team that acts as orchestrator, challenger, and enabler. In practical terms, that means helping teams navigate dependencies, clear bottlenecks, and adjust sequencing when conditions change—not taking every decision away from delivery teams.
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Governance also has to reach beyond the project plan. McKinsey’s 2025 analysis, Inside agile telcos: Organizing to value and what it takes to succeed, emphasizes unified steering and ongoing review of the operating model. Its 2026 article, The critical bets on the future of telco value creation, stresses visible, sustained leadership and strategic direction, and identifies change-management specialists as one potential partner category for AI-driven reinvention. These points put leadership, adoption, and organizational capability inside the transformation rather than treating them as communications tasks at the end.
How can leaders test whether the program is ready for a vendor decision?
Use these questions to expose unresolved decisions before they become embedded in a procurement or implementation plan.
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| Area | Readiness question | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| Business impact | Can accountable leaders describe the intended business change, not just the system to be installed? | The business case is mostly a list of technical deliverables. |
| Ownership | Are business and IT leaders involved in defining needs and shaping options? | The scope is effectively fixed before business owners participate. |
| Operating model | Are the roles, processes, and capabilities needed to use the new technology understood? | The program assumes that implementation alone will change how work gets done. |
| Incentives | Do measures and rewards support the cross-functional outcomes the program depends on? | Teams are held to local targets that pull against shared goals. |
| Governance | Is there a team with the remit to coordinate dependencies and help remove bottlenecks? | Status is visible, but no one can act on conflicts across initiatives. |
| Adoption | Are leadership, capability-building, and changes to day-to-day work part of the plan? | Adoption is assumed or left until after technical delivery. |
What do transformation failure estimates actually tell us?
Failure-rate figures are useful as warnings, not as a precise forecast for a particular operator. McKinsey’s 2021 telecom blueprint states that 70 percent of all transformation efforts fail. BCG’s 2024 article gives its estimate that more than 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives. The two statements use different wording and scope; neither establishes a measured, universal failure rate for telecom transformations specifically.
The more actionable lesson is narrower: a vendor or platform decision cannot compensate for unclear ambition, missing business ownership, conflicting incentives, or weak orchestration. Settling those organizational choices gives technology selection a defined job to do.
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