When transformation needs a home

For some, the concept of a transformation function evokes little more than a program management office. We don’t subscribe to that view. To us, a transformation function is the difference between an organization that works in silos to make efficiency improvements and one that moves as a unit toward a measurable vision—delivering a unified, intelligent experience that drives outsized outcomes.

Not every organization needs a dedicated transformation function. But if you’re a large, at-scale enterprise—and if you aspire to transformative change rather than incremental progress—there are a few leading indicators that suggest you might.

Shift to an enterprise mindset

It happens fast. A wave of organic or inorganic growth, and suddenly you’ve got more business units than customer segments. Go-to-market motions become disjointed. Customers are forced to log into one portal for one product, another for the next. They receive outreach from separate business units—each with no context on the other. “Why do I need to give you my address again? I gave it to someone else at your company last week.” We’ve all been there.

To buck the trend, many Fortune 500-like organizations are rethinking their operating model. They’re rightsizing the number of business units relative to the customer segments they care about. Maybe they collapse down to two P&Ls—B2B and B2C, for instance. But even with a simplified structure, old habits die hard. People still work in the legacy model. The collaboration you need just isn’t happening. And that’s where a transformation function can help—not to rewrite the org chart, but to enable the enterprise mindset your strategy now calls for.

From SKUs to solutions

Or maybe your products are naturally complementary, and the next wave of growth lies in bundling them into holistic solutions. The challenge? This shift requires systems and teams that once operated autonomously to act in concert.

One manufacturing client made this shift. To enable a unified solution go-to-market strategy, they had to align three distinct domains: the physical product teams that engineer and build the offerings, the mobile application teams that allow customers to interact with and manage smart products, and the digital function responsible for outbound marketing, ecommerce, and key lead-to-cash capabilities like CPQ, fulfillment, and customer care. All three were critical. But working together wasn’t the default. Transformation, in this case, wasn’t a PMO—it was the connective tissue that brought these parts together to build something greater than the sum of their parts.

Speed ≠ transformation

Sometimes the operating model is streamlined. The issue lies elsewhere.

Maybe your teams jump straight to system and process design when they hear the word “transformation,” but skip the strategic work in the “missing middle.” There’s no measurable vision. No reimagined future-state experience. The result? A faster version of the same company. While that may create short-term value, it’s unlikely to yield durable advantage—especially when technologies like agentic AI make those same gains easily replicable by competitors.

One client saw this pattern unfolding and acted. They carved out dedicated transformation resources to focus on the missing middle. The goal wasn’t just to move faster—it was to reinvent how they engage constituents. They knew that asking a technical lead to design a future-state vision off the side of their desk, while also managing architecture, would never work. For transformations that aim to change how an organization fundamentally operates, dedicated resources aren’t a luxury. They’re a prerequisite.

A home for transformation

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? If your organization is struggling to gain traction—even with the right intentions and initiatives—a transformation function may be the structure you need. Not just to coordinate work, but to unify vision, connect teams, and ensure your future isn’t just faster, but fundamentally different.