Tech Transformation Tech Transformation The people side of the transformation: teams involved, roles, capabilities, and the human factors that shaped how the programme played out.
If there is one factor that has shaped the difficulty of this programme more than any other it is the gap between the direction set by senior leadership and the understanding and adoption demonstrated by the tech team. It is the root cause of the majority of technical friction encountered from Phase 3 onwards.
From the outset the programme was designed to bring the tech team with it and they were central to the plan. The senior leadership team invested heavily in sharing context, the architecture principles, the strategic direction, the rationale behind every major decision. The aim was to empower them to grow into the new model and become active participants in designing ESco's technical future rather than passive recipients of instruction.
That intent was real and sustained over a long period but was also ultimately not realised.
Despite the volume of context shared with them, the tech team continued to operate in ways that reflected the old model. They remained gatekeepers of existing systems and inherited approaches rather than making the shift toward the kind of strategic thinking the programme required. Engagement with senior leadership was inconsistent and messages from one conversation did not reliably carry into the next. Decisions made collectively were not always actioned in the spirit they were intended.
The tech team hold senior positions in the business, but senior position and senior leadership are not the same thing. What was consistently missing was the initiative, the accountability and joined-up thinking those positions imply. The mixed signals coming back to the leadership team, different interpretations, unclear status on key workstreams, uncertainty about whether the direction had landed, built up over time into a recurring drain on progress across the programme.
In October 2025, a deliberate decision was made to clarify the expectation and change needed. The tech team were moved out of developer roles entirely and it new title and function called the Solutions Team. They were rebranded not as builders of software, but finders and configurers of the right tools and systems to solve business problems. ESco's direction of travel away from bespoke development and towards a more buy not build, integration-led architecture made this a logical and necessary evolution.
The change was communicated directly and was an attempt to remove the identity friction that had been slowing them down and give them a well-defined role in the new model.
The honest assessment is that the pattern has persisted. The volume of context provided to the tech team over the life of this programme has been substantial and the direction has been clear. But the level of adoption of what ESco is trying to become and why, has remained incomplete.
For anyone reading this documentation and trying to understand why certain decisions took longer than expected, why some architectural conversations had to be had more than once, or why senior leadership has carried more of the technical strategic load than anticipated, this is the explanation. Not a failure of technology or a failure of strategy. A persistent gap between the people leading the change and the people who needed to change with it.