Digital Projects: Why Continuous Evolution Beats Starting Over

Companies often look to innovation for a strategic advantage, right? However, a common mistake is to restart digital projects instead of improving and building on the foundations already in place. This happens for several reasons, which I’ll discuss below.

This practice can lead to high costs, lower productivity, and stalled progress in digital maturity. In this article, I also cover the risks of “starting over and redoing things” and explain why an approach based on continuous evolution and project maintenance can be more effective.

Why do companies start over instead of evolving?

In my more than 20 years of experience in the digital ecosystem, I’ve seen many reasons, but the three most common are the ones I’ll list below:

Reason 1: The all-too-common lack of continuity planning

This happens more often than it should. Many companies launch a digital project, whether it’s a website, app, e-commerce store, or even a platform, without understanding that once something is created, it needs to be maintained and evolved. Otherwise, it gets left behind.

As a result, many projects are launched and quickly become obsolete and fall into disuse. Failing to define a clear evolution roadmap leads to repeated failures. Then we often go back to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong, only to fall into the familiar cycle of rework.

Reason 2: Choosing the wrong vendor

This is often driven by the factor that guides most competitive bids: PRICE.

Yes, unfortunately, there’s a belief that competitors offering the lowest price will deliver exactly the same thing, even when the scope is the same. That’s not how it works in practice.

I don’t think the lowest-priced vendor is necessarily the worst, or that the highest-priced one is the best. But the key question is whether the company has the experience and technical expertise needed to deliver the project at the required level of quality, especially if you’re planning to have a continuity plan, right?

Evaluating a digital project solely on price is a major mistake. You need to assess everything included: how many hours are involved, whether the detailed scope of work is the same, and the seniority of the professionals involved.

Reason 3: A change in company leadership

Restarting or discontinuing a project because the company’s positioning or strategy has changed is part of the process and needs to be carefully considered. After all, what worked before may not be right for the company’s new direction.

In many cases, leadership changes bring a tendency to “start over” under the pretext of innovation.

Unfortunately, though, we see projects redone simply because leadership wants to put its own ego ahead of the institution’s real interests. This is extremely serious and causes major technological setbacks, frustrating the teams involved, erasing historical knowledge, and often forcing the company to start its relationships with new vendors from scratch. Those vendors don’t know the company, its business, its assumptions, or its particular needs.

The concept of Digital Maturity and the importance of continuity

Digital maturity is a company’s ability to adopt and integrate digital practices progressively and sustainably, driving digital transformation that goes beyond adopting new technologies to integrating them in ways that create ongoing value.

According to Gartner consulting, organizations with mature digital strategies are significantly more effective at adapting quickly to market changes and responding to new consumer demands. This effectiveness comes from continuously building on solid foundations, allowing each innovation and adjustment to add to what has already been implemented while making use of established data, insights, and processes.

Companies that restart projects instead of evolving them end up abandoning their accumulated history and expertise, which can mean losing their competitive edge.

A McKinsey study finds that 75% of companies that take an evolutionary approach to digital maturity see a return on their digital investment up to 50% faster than those with a start-over mentality.

Continuity allows incremental adjustments to make an impact without disruption, creating an environment where learning and improvements build on each other, driving operational efficiency and sustainable innovation.

The negative impact of frequent changes to established digital platforms

Statistics (Gartner, 2023) indicate that about 45% of companies face challenges adapting when implementing new systems, and it can take six months to a year to stabilize their use, according to a McKinsey study. This highlights the following impacts:

• Higher operating costs: Implementation, integration, and training costs for a new platform can be substantial.
• Loss of productivity: Teams are forced to readjust, which undermines productivity and creates a gap between the value previously delivered and the time needed to reach the same level on the new platform.
• Disruption to data and processes: Historical data and workflows refined over the years are interrupted, resulting in rework and the loss of valuable insights for future decisions.

Ongoing evolution as a pillar of Digital Maturity

When a focus on digital maturity gives way to radical changes, long-term strategies are interrupted.

Studies show that organizations that change systems more than three times in five years tend to have 30% lower digital maturity growth than companies that follow a continuous evolutionary path (source: McKinsey, 2022).

This reinforces the importance of leadership committed to a vision of incremental growth.

To achieve robust digital maturity, it’s essential to adopt a mindset of continuity and improvement. Changes may be necessary, but they should focus on incremental growth while preserving accumulated resources and expertise.