Romain Guery-OdelinConsulting · Departmental local authority · 2023 - 2025 · Business analyst and change management consultant
Steering a transformation with the executive team
A digital transformation involved directorates, elected officials, the IT department and subcontractors all at once — two starkly opposed views to hold in the same room, every week.
Context
Departmental local authority, from 2023 to 2025.
The problem
Leading a digital transformation involving directorates, elected officials, IT and subcontractors, with two camps that had stopped listening to each other. On the business side: a feeling of not being heard, a solution perceived as imposed, change that wasn’t understood. On the IT side: real technical constraints (uptime, security updates), difficulty meeting the business teams halfway, and a software choice that was hard to justify without sounding like a lecture.
What I did
- Running around 80 weekly leadership committees over two years, across two deputy directorates-general.
- Translating IT’s technical constraints into issues the business teams could understand, and vice versa: making business needs audible on the IT side.
- Planning, meeting minutes and communication with every party: directorates, elected officials, IT, subcontractors.
- Systematically defusing tension before it blocked a decision: reframing, getting others to reframe, moving past blame back to facts.
The result
Close to 80 committees held without interruption over two years, in a highly political environment where any meeting could have turned into a blame session. The result isn’t a growth number: it’s a climate. A regular dialogue replaced the standoff between business teams and IT, stable enough that difficult decisions (including the data migration, see related case) got made jointly instead of stalling on mutual deadlock.
~80 weekly committees run across two deputy directorates-general, in a very political environment, to break a standoff between business teams and IT.