A successful digital transformation is largely contingent on how well you structure your project team. When we work with clients, some of the most common questions we hear are: How do we structure our team? How do we leverage outside resources? What internal resources do we need? What should our project manager actually be responsible for? And what role does the steering committee play? This post walks through the key roles every transformation project team needs and, more importantly, the roles that most organizations overlook.
The Core Roles Every Project Team Needs
Executive Steering Committee
The steering committee is arguably the most important role on the project team. This is typically a cross-functional group of executives responsible for setting the vision for the overall transformation. They approve scope changes, material changes to the project plan or budget, and are ultimately responsible for defining the future-state operating model.
Before filling out the rest of the project team, the steering committee must be aligned on the transformation’s vision, strategy, and objectives. In our experience, organizations that start staffing the project team before achieving executive alignment almost always run into internal conflict that could have been avoided. The steering committee is also responsible for project governance, including decisions about scope changes, budget adjustments, and changes to the business process operating model.
Project Manager
The project manager is the internal resource responsible for reporting to the steering committee and overseeing everything that happens on the project. This includes managing all resources, all workstreams, and everything discussed in this post.
An important distinction: your system integrator will provide their own project lead or technical project manager, but that is not your project manager. Your project manager sits above the SI’s team and is accountable for the full scope of the transformation, not just the technology workstream. Organizations that confuse these two roles consistently run into coordination problems and misaligned priorities.
Technical Lead
The technical lead (sometimes called the technical project manager) is responsible for overseeing all functional and technical aspects of design, configuration, testing, and everything related to the technology platform. This person typically comes from or works closely with the system integrator.
Within this workstream, you will also have a series of functional leads or process leads responsible for specific areas of the system.
Functional Leads and Subject Matter Experts
Functional leads are responsible for leading the design, testing, and training for a specific part of the business (e.g., finance, CRM, supply chain, HR). Depending on your industry and the scope of your transformation, these functional areas will vary.
Each functional area typically has a blend of internal and external resources. The system integrator provides a consultant for each module, and that person partners with an internal subject matter expert (SME) who understands how the business actually operates. Within each functional area, you may also have additional SMEs responsible for specific sub-processes, such as accounts payable within finance or customer service within CRM.
The depth and number of SMEs will vary depending on the size and complexity of your organization.
The Roles Most Organizations Overlook
The roles above represent the typical project team structure. The problem is that most organizations stop here. They assume the system integrator’s scope is the entire project scope, and they build their team and budget around that assumption. In reality, there are several additional roles that are critical to success.
Data Lead
The data lead is responsible for ensuring that data gets cleansed, that there is a migration plan, and that master data management processes are in place to keep data clean after go-live. Data quality is one of the most common reasons transformations fail to deliver value, and having a dedicated resource focused on it from the start is essential.
Change Management Lead
The change management lead is responsible for the people side of the transformation. This includes designing the future-state organization, identifying change impacts, ensuring stakeholder alignment, and managing communication and training.
An important point: change management is not just training. Before training begins, the change team needs to have completed organizational design, change impact analysis, and stakeholder alignment work. Training is the execution phase of change management, not the whole thing. When we advise clients on building their organizational change management capability for a transformation, we recommend staffing this role early and giving it the same visibility as the technical workstream.
System Architect
The system architect looks at the overall technology landscape and defines how systems will integrate, which systems will be commissioned or decommissioned, and where the single source of truth will live for each data domain. This role works closely with the data lead.
The system architect is especially important in best-of-breed environments where multiple platforms are being deployed simultaneously. For example, if you are implementing an ERP as your core platform alongside a separate CRM, the system architect is the person who ensures those systems work together as a cohesive whole. This role is a critical input into your overall technology enablement strategy.
Business Process Owner
The business process owner is responsible for defining the bigger-picture framework for how business processes should look across the organization. While functional leads focus on how to design and configure the software, the business process owner ensures that process improvements and standardization decisions are made from the top down rather than module by module.
Without this role, organizations often end up with disconnected process decisions that do not align across departments. Having a dedicated business process owner ensures that your business process optimization work is cohesive and tied to the strategic vision defined by the steering committee.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is the role that sits outside the day-to-day project work and provides an independent view of risks, issues, and overall project health. This person helps the steering committee and project leadership make informed decisions by identifying pitfalls and risks that the team, buried in the weeds of daily execution, may not see.
When you are deep in a transformation, things move so quickly that it becomes very easy to lose sight of the big picture. The QA role exists to maintain that perspective. In our experience, organizations that invest in independent ERP implementation quality assurance consistently avoid the most costly surprises.
How to Build Your Team: Practical Guidance
As you construct your project team, keep these principles in mind:
- Do not base your team structure or budget solely on what the system integrator proposes. Their scope covers the technical workstream, not the full transformation.
- Staff the steering committee and project manager roles first. Do not fill functional roles until executive alignment is in place.
- Plan for data, change management, system architecture, business process ownership, and quality assurance from the start, not as afterthoughts when problems emerge.
- Budget for backfills. Internal SMEs and functional leads cannot do their day jobs and a transformation at the same time.
Getting these decisions right during Phase 0 planning sets the foundation for everything that follows.
Questions We Hear Most
How Many People Does a Digital Transformation Project Team Need?
There is no single answer, but the scale of your team should reflect the scale of your transformation. A mid-market organization implementing a single ERP platform might need 15 to 25 dedicated team members across all workstreams. A large enterprise with multiple platforms, geographies, and business units could require 50 to 100 or more.
The key variable is not just headcount but capacity. When we advise clients on this, we recommend mapping out the time commitment required for each role by project phase and comparing it against what those individuals are already responsible for in their day jobs. Most organizations underestimate the time commitment required from internal resources, which leads to burnout, delays, and quality issues.
Should You Use Internal or External Resources?
Most successful project teams use a blend of both. Internal resources bring institutional knowledge, credibility with the business, and long-term accountability. External resources bring methodology, technology expertise, and bandwidth.
The most common mistake we see is over-reliance on the system integrator for roles that should be filled internally, especially the project manager and business process owner. Conversely, organizations sometimes underinvest in external support for specialized roles like system architecture, data migration, and independent quality assurance.
A vendor-neutral advisor can help you determine the right mix. If you are planning a transformation and want guidance on how to structure your project team, contact us at eric.kimberling@thirdstage-consulting.com.
What Happens When You Get the Team Structure Wrong?
The consequences are predictable and costly:
- Without a dedicated project manager above the SI, the technical workstream drives all decisions and the business side of the transformation gets neglected.
- Without a change management lead, training is rushed, adoption is low, and the organization blames the technology for what is actually a people problem.
- Without a data lead, you go live with dirty data and spend months after go-live cleaning up problems that should have been resolved before cutover.
- Without quality assurance, risks accumulate silently until they surface as budget overruns, missed deadlines, or operational disruptions.
Every one of these is avoidable with the right team structure in place from the start. The investment in getting this right during your digital transformation strategy planning phase pays for itself many times over.
Eric is recognized globally as a leading voice in digital transformation and ERP strategy. Over the past two decades, he has helped hundreds of organizations – including Nucor Steel, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Kodak, Coors, Boeing, and Duke Energy – define their technology roadmaps, modernize complex operations, and deliver real business value from large-scale transformation initiatives.
As Founder and CEO of Third Stage Consulting, Eric leads an independent, technology-agnostic advisory firm focused on helping clients navigate the shift from traditional ERP to more flexible, AI-enabled Digital Enterprise Operations (DEO) models. His work spans ERP selection, implementation quality assurance, organizational change, and operating model design across a wide range of industries and geographies.
Eric is also a prolific thought leader, known for his pragmatic takes on AI, cloud, and enterprise software trends, as well as his firm’s benchmark research and frameworks for de-risking transformation. He is dedicated to helping executive teams cut through vendor hype, make confident investment decisions, and successfully reach the “third stage” of their digital evolution.
