[krishvs]

Wow - the 4 stages of product development seems quite spot on from my experience working on b2b enterprise software products.

No doubt that the Finance team is generally the most powerful entity in shaping a companies direction both internally as well as in your clients organisation. Finance teams love control, are (mostly) completely risk-averse and change averse. The same can also be said about badly run IT teams.

I have seen product/automation implementations being deployed seamlessly in all departments from operations to procurement but completely fail due to the finance teams. In extreme cases I have seen finance teams have so much power that they even override the CEOs decisions to make implementations fail if they feel that they are loosing control or do not like the new process workflow that the implementation brings in.

For digital transformation projects the implementation team needs to speak the language of finance, operations as well as IT. Otherwise the chances of the implementation really succeeding is close to nil.