Planview’s Project to Product State of the Industry Report Reveals 40% of Digital Innovation Work is Wasted

Insights from 3,600 software development value streams across industries show the slow adoption of the shift from project to product, and reveal that the future success of digitalization hangs in the balance

Planview, the leading platform for connected work from portfolio planning to delivery, announced today the release of the 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report. The landmark report, which benchmarks organizational shifts required to support and accelerate digital innovation, found that many companies are unable to complete transformational work due to immature operating models and management systems.

Among the key findings in Planview’s report, only 8% of organizations have successfully operationalized their project to product transformation. The low success rate contradicts the previously optimistic outlook from a 2018 report claiming that 85% of executives said they had either adopted or had plans to adopt a product-centric model, motivated by a desire to improve speed to market and agility and to support the move to digital business. Five years later, the report’s data underscores the complexity of this multi-year process and its required buy-in and commitment across all levels of the organization.

“In boardrooms across the globe, executives are being mandated to prioritize technology investments that ensure their companies transform and emerge from the current downturn stronger. While some enterprise initiatives are managed as projects, a product-based operating model holds the key to increased efficiency, better customer outcomes, and profitable growth for digital portfolios,” said Dr. Mik Kersten, CTO, Planview and author of the bestselling book Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. “The consequences of slow delivery and technical debt can be seen in very public profit losses and system-wide malfunctions. While there are no shortcuts, there is a roadmap of best practices that accelerates the transition, which the report outlines.”

The report from Planview, which uniquely combines survey data from 326 respondents with systems data from 3,600+ software development value streams in 34 of the world’s leading enterprises, reveals that five years into the shift from project to product:

• 92% of businesses do not have the foundation for a product-oriented model, causing their digital transformation efforts to fail
• Business leaders believe their IT and software development teams, in charge of transformation efforts, can deliver 10x more than their actual capacity, leading to team burnout
• 40% of digital innovation work from IT and engineering teams are wasted due to shifting priorities at the C-level
• Only 8% of what’s planned by IT and software development teams gets delivered, inefficiency that can no longer be ignored given today’s cost and performance pressures

Given the criticality of this shift for the future success of traditional companies versus early adopters, this report outlines the critical steps needed to accelerate this transition: a partnership between executives and senior product and development leadership to do the following:

• Benchmark their progress versus their competitors
• Understand and implement best practices to shorten the time it takes to capture the ROI of transformation efforts
• Identify the organizational attributes that increase the likelihood of operationalizing the product model by learning which efforts to prioritize

“This report is the first of its kind to benchmark the success of enterprise transformation initiatives based on the dimensions first outlined in Dr. Mik Kersten’s seminal book five years ago,” said Jonathan Webster, Managing Director and Partner, Boston Consulting Group. “While the research shows that the majority of organizations are still in the early stages of their product-model journey, the report offers the blueprint for leaders to accelerate the remainder of the effort.”

This report follows Planview’s acquisition of Tasktop last year. Planview Tasktop solutions implement the popular Flow Framework® created by Dr. Mik Kersten, former Tasktop Founder & CEO.

Go here to download the full report from Planview: The 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report

About Planview

Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work, from ideas to impact. Planview helps organizations accelerate the achievement of what matters most, supporting our customers from need to speed, from passion to progress, and from overhead to optimization. Our connected platform of solutions underpins the business and digital transformations of more than 4,500 customers globally, including 59 of the Fortune 100. Planview empowers enterprises to improve time-to-market and predictability, increase efficiency to unlock capacity, and ensure their most strategic initiatives deliver the desired business outcomes. Learn more about our portfolio at planview.com, and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Report Methodology

• Survey data was collected from April – December 2022
  • It was analyzed using regression analysis to check for interdependence and correlation of responses with the stage organizations have reached in the shift. (The Firth Logistic Regression method was used, which is well-tested for data sets of this size.)
  • 326 individuals from 253 unique companies
  • Top 4 industries: Financial Services, Healthcare, Technology, Energy/Utilities
  • Geographies: 53% North America, 28% Europe, 15% APAC, 3% South America, 1% Africa
  • Job Levels: 67% Manager, 14% Director, 10% Executive, 9% Consultant
  • Functional Areas: 50% Engineering/IT, 13% PMO, 10% Consultant, 6% Product Management, 4% Transformation, 10% Other (various functions)
• Anonymized systems data was aggregated from over 3,600 value streams from 34 organizations.

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