Teams at this stage often underestimate how much genuine alignment matters — and how different counterfeit agreement looks from the real thing until implementation begins.

Common patterns include mistaking nominal agreement for genuine commitment; securing investment decision-maker approval without building alignment across the functional leads, operational teams, and IT partners who will live with the decision daily; assuming that a sound analysis will automatically lead to buy-in; discovering late that key stakeholders have concerns that were never surfaced; building a business case that is technically accurate but not legible to investment decision-makers; and overstating the case in ways that secure approval but create credibility problems later when reality diverges from the projection.

When these gaps surface, progress slows or stalls — not because the investment direction is wrong, but because the confidence and alignment behind it were thinner than they appeared.

The assumption most practitioners at this stage are operating on is that the main remaining task is building the business case and securing stakeholder alignment. The direction is set; what is needed now is the internal work to get the investment approved.

What the evidence consistently shows is that the hardest problems at this stage are not the ones that look hard from inside.

The business case can be technically sound while resting on operating model assumptions that have not been resolved. Stakeholder alignment can feel genuine while masking significant differences in what people think they have agreed to - what practitioners describe as counterfeit yeses - where commitment in principle coexists with resistance in practice once the implications become concrete. And the maturity assessment that underpins the investment case tends to reflect the organisation's aspirational state rather than the state it is actually in.

These are not problems that more internal work will surface. They tend to become visible only when the plan is exposed to people who have been through comparable commitments in comparable organisations and have no stake in the answer being yes.

BPC's outside-in view at this stage comes from practitioners who have built confidence and stress-tested comparable investment cases. Tell us about your context and we can find the most relevant comparisons.