Most organisations improve the two dimensions they can see. The cost usually sits in the ones they cannot, and that is why the same problem comes back wearing different clothes.
01 The two you can see
Technology and process. They are visible, they have owners, and there is always a vendor willing to help. So the programme becomes a system implementation with a process map attached, and when the benefit does not arrive the conclusion is that the technology was wrong.
02 What sits in the next ten
Decision rights. Data definitions. Governance. Skills and capability. Incentives. Supplier and contract management. Risk appetite. Information flow. Structure. Culture. None of these is a project anyone volunteers to run, and any one of them can hold a transformation still on its own.
03 Forty is not a bigger project
Forty-plus dimensions is not an instruction to fix forty things - that would take years and most of it would be waste. It is a map. Its value is that it shows you where you have not looked. An organisation that has genuinely assessed forty dimensions and found that two matter is in a far stronger position than one that assessed two and found that two matter.
04 Triage is the actual skill
Score each dimension for current maturity and for how much this year’s objective depends on it. The interesting cells are the ones where dependence is high and maturity is low - usually two or three, rarely more. Those get funded properly. The rest get watched. That is a plan a board can approve, and it is small enough to finish.
05 What it costs not to look
The recurring cost of an unexamined dimension is not a line in the budget, which is exactly why it survives. It shows up as rework, as decisions that take three weeks, as a system nobody uses, as the second transformation programme in five years addressing the first one’s symptoms.