How to Fail Your Team: Ignoring the Human Element in Business/Technical Transformation

Digital transformation projects don’t typically fail because of bad code; they fail because they overlook the human element. That was the central theme of this candid panel at Innovation Summit 2025, where technology and data leaders from legal and financial institutions shared how misaligned priorities, neglected user needs, and change fatigue can quietly derail even the most well-designed initiatives. Their collective experience reinforced a critical truth: success in business transformation starts with people, not platforms. Watch the full session below and take note of these hard-won lessons:

Key Takeaways:

1. Failure Often Isn’t Technical
   Most project failures stem not from poor technology, but from insufficient attention to user adoption, change management, and stakeholder engagement. As one panelist noted, “Build it and they will not adopt” without sustained, human-centered support.
2. Adoption Begins Long Before Launch
   Success must be defined—and owned—by users from the outset. That means co-creating goals, involving the right stakeholders early, and embedding change champions to drive adoption post-launch. A polished dashboard means little if no one uses it.
3. Measure What Matters – Before and After
   Setting success metrics at the top of a project is essential, but so is measuring impact after deployment. Utilization data, feedback loops, and behavioral signals help teams iterate, refine, and prevent valuable tools from going unused.
4. In Regulated Industries, Innovation Requires Navigating Guardrails
   Legal and banking leaders highlighted how regulations can limit direct access to end users. In these contexts, success demands proxy strategies—like internal focus groups, external benchmarking, and human-centered workflow mapping—to ensure solutions are aligned with actual needs.

Transcript:

Moderator: “Emily, please introduce yourself—and I have a bonus question for you: what does it mean to be human‑centered in your role?”
Emily Rushing: “Hi, thank you. Great to see everyone—good morning. My name is Emily Rushing; I’m the Director of Data Strategy for Holland & Knight, a top‑25 law firm with $2 billion‑plus in revenue and about 4,500 professionals—roughly half lawyers and half business personnel. People are our business; we joke that all we sell is time and minds. You’d think that would make us very human‑centric as an industry, but it can be a challenge: whose shoes do you stand in, and how do you understand shoes that keep evolving—generationally, technologically, psychologically? Human‑centered should always be more empathetic, embracing what a person is going through in terms of change, challenge, and opportunity. It’s something we can always strive to do better.”
Moderator: “Awesome. Thank you, Emily—welcome.”

Moderator: “Next, Bill Fortwangler—please introduce yourself and tell us what human‑centered means to you.”
Bill Fortwangler: “I’m Bill Fortwangler, CIO of Dollar Bank. I’ve been here eight years; the bank’s been around since 1855—and still does some things from 1855! That’s why I was hired: to change online banking, the culture, and so forth. I’ve worked for nine Pittsburgh‑area companies and been in IT 39 years. Each year I think I’ve seen everything—and I haven’t.
“Human‑centered means involving the end‑users who’ll actually use what you build and involving all the departments building it. Whether you’re making a car or a self‑flushing toilet—talk about failure there—the total involvement and continual evolution of the product or service is critical. You can’t satisfy everyone, but online banking now lets you tweak settings to get closer. Still, each person is unique—what I like may differ from what Scott likes—so designing for a broad population while respecting individual needs is the challenge.”
Moderator: “Thank you, Bill.”

Moderator: “And lastly, we have Scott.”
Scott Angelo: “Hello, everyone. My name is Scott Angelo; I’m the CIO at Buchanan. We’re a midsize, national law firm headquartered in Pittsburgh. We just celebrated our 175th anniversary—not all under the same name, but as the same firm—which is pretty impressive. You’ve got to be doing something right to last that long.
“I’ve been in the IT‑ish world my whole career—over 30 years. I started as an intelligence officer, and that shapes my view of human‑centered design: understand everything about your target to improve chances of success.
“After that, I spent ten years in R&D—NASA, then DARPA—learning to build solutions with stakeholders. A decade in management consulting taught me to be a great listener. ‘Build it and they will come’ is wrong; ‘build it and they won’t adopt unless you do it right’ is closer to truth. Most project failures are human, not tech.
“The last ten years feel like my capstone: AI, automation, analytics—everything I’ve learned is converging. Buchanan has had tremendous success with innovation because we know what not to do, and we listen.”

Panel Topic 1: Defining Failure

Moderator: “That brings us to the failure section. Emily, what does failure mean to you? Then Bill and Scott can weigh in.”
Emily: “I think I got this question because fail in the session title caught my eye—it’s a word with feelings! Failure starts with unclear success measures. Define success at the outset. Think beyond internal stakeholders to the wider community: the organization, the profession, the users, the team. When framing success, I ask: Is it good for the rule of law, the business, the lawyers, the IT‑innovation team?
“That opens a human‑centric lens: put yourself in the user’s shoes and ask: Who’s the team? What’s success? If you’re afraid of failure, you’re already failing. KPIs are crucial—we’ve had too many arguments post‑project about ‘was it successful?’ People obsess over budget or timeline—three months late—but did it matter?
“Take the self‑flushing toilet: if it flushes six times while I’m still there, am I saving water? Or a fantastic car priced so high no one buys it. Failure can appear long after delivery.
“For example, we increased call‑center authentication from two factors to four—PIN, SSN, driver’s‑license number. The call center lit up; customers were furious. Everything else was perfect, but that one human‑interaction miss labeled the project a failure.
“You also need nerve: fear kills entrepreneurial spirit. Expect some failures—that’s innovation. Define KPIs—financial, customer‑satisfaction, whatever. Timing matters too: law firms can’t absorb change in November or December. Know your audience, culture, business.”

Real‑World Failure Story

Moderator: “Emily, any concrete failure examples?”
Emily: “Absolutely. True story: a legal‑ops group asked for a dashboard—apps, routing, automation. Business case looked great. We scoped it, built a gorgeous product, demoed it, sent credentials, quick‑start guide—done. Classic technologist myopia: I thought change was finished.
“I didn’t stay for transformation: ‘Remember that spreadsheet? Stop using it—use the dashboard.’ No follow‑through, no change‑management. Six months later nobody had logged in. The requester said, ‘One person left, nobody told the new folks, we lost track.’ Huge lesson: success metrics and change resources must be involved from pre‑inception.
“Today we assign a change‑and‑transformation team from the concept phase, keep continual onboarding, identify champions, check in at two‑weeks, month‑end, and beyond. Someone from the product team stays with users—arm‑in‑arm—for months, gathering feedback.”

Audience Q&A on Failure

Audience Member: “It seems these failures weren’t tech errors but human‑process gaps.”
Bill: “Exactly. Most failures I’ve seen aren’t buggy tech; they’re bad implementations or unchanged business processes. At Dollar Bank we delayed new tech until we transformed fax‑based processes, for instance.”
Scott: “People, process, then technology—and now data. Post‑production measurement is critical: are users actually using it? Utilization data lets you intervene and iterate. We work in MVPs and theory‑of‑constraints thinking to handle this.”

Constraints in Regulated Industries

Audience Member: “In highly regulated sectors, guardrails can block access to customers. How do you reach the source?”
Bill: “Sometimes compliance allows alternatives—e‑mails instead of letters, for example. Regulations are heavy, but you can often modernize communication with the right approvals.”
Emily: “Law‑firm relationships add complexity: partners ‘own’ clients, so we rely on internal focus groups, third‑party facilitators, and candid workshops to mine insights without stepping on client relationships.”

Perception of C‑Level Detachment

Audience Member: “Do people assume CIOs or data‑strategy heads don’t care about people?”
Scott: “Totally incorrect. The higher you go, the less technical and the more human you must be. Everyone watches you—peers, boss, staff, customers. I once fielded a LinkedIn complaint at a Steelers game because that’s the job in a small bank.”

Measuring the Human Element Without Survey Fatigue

Audience Member: “How do you measure the human element without exhausting users?”
Bill: “We blend after‑call surveys, IT‑service‑desk surveys, external NPS firms, Apple/Google app ratings, and marketing‑run focus groups. Focus groups are gold for what customers really want.”
Emily: “Third‑party interviews within practice groups help us get candid internal feedback and uncover adoption drivers.”

Balancing Innovation Speed with Reality

Audience Member: “How do you balance innovation speed with meeting users where they are?”
Bill: “Sometimes an unbiased third party is needed to push change. Our biggest hurdle is business‑domain change, not IT.
Scott: “Process re‑engineering and mapping ‘as‑is’ workflows expose cognitive bias and let momentum build systematically.”

Panel Topic 2: Success at Project Kickoff

Moderator: “Final question: what does success look like at the top of a project?”

Bill

• Formal Intake & Governance: Over‑kill is better than guesswork; intake keeps evolving.
  
• KPIs Up Front, Monitored Post‑Launch: The PMO and accounting track revenue, expense savings, or user metrics.
  
• Value Over Cost/Time: Our new‑account‑opening flow was five months late but now converts far more customers—so it’s a success.
  

Emily

• Clear Strategic Objective on Paper: Nothing moves until everyone agrees.
  
• ‘Art of the Possible’ Ideation: Park the how (tech, product names) and decide if the organization can absorb the change—bandwidth, vision, stakeholders, NPS path.
  

Scott

• Program‑Level & Project‑Level Intake: These are business projects; value outcomes rule.
  
• Two‑in‑a‑Box Ownership: IT plus a committed business stakeholder. Without that, risk is high.
  

Showcase by Stakeholders: Business owners present successes to peers, driving credibility. Result: 27 innovation projects in production during 2024.

Moderator: “We’re right on time. On behalf of the Human‑Centered Design team—and all users—thank you for championing human‑centered design.”