Funding is up. Delivery is down. The gap is structural.
Annual outcome study. 214 programmes, four years of data, one uncomfortable pattern.
Funding is up. Delivery is down. The gap is structural.
Mid-market transformation is not failing for lack of ambition or investment. Programmes in our cohort were funded at a median 2.3% of revenue and sponsored at board level, and where they failed, they failed on load: too many concurrent priorities, too little verified sequencing, and governance rhythms that reviewed activity rather than the outcomes they were meant to produce.
The 2026 edition adds 61 programmes to the cohort and, for the first time, isolates the effect of implementation oversight. Programmes with independent delivery assurance retained 84% of projected value at month 24, against 47% for those without. We spent most of the analysis trying to explain that gap away, because an organisation willing to fund independent assurance may simply be better run to begin with, and observational data of this kind cannot fully separate the two effects. The report sets out the full cohort data, the verification method, and the three structural decisions that most reliably separate the top quartile.
Median value delivery at month 24 for programmes holding three or fewer concurrent priorities. It is a median. Half the group came in below it.
Median value delivery for programmes running six or more priorities. They spent 40% more on external support to get there.
Value retained under independent implementation oversight, against 47% without it.
Median decision latency saved per year in organisations that moved to a fixed operating cadence.
Share of projected financial value verified as delivered, by number of concurrent programme priorities. Each bar is a median, and the spread inside every band is wide, so the exhibit describes a tendency across the cohort rather than the likely fate of any single programme sitting inside it. Full method in section 6 of the report.
Count your concurrent priorities. Count the ones that are real, not the ones on the slide. If the number is above three, the data says you are already paying for it.
Sequence the ambition instead of trimming it. Phase the portfolio; keep the full programme alive on paper.
Separate delivery assurance from delivery. The 37-point retention gap belongs to whoever owns that split. Clients ask whether one person can hold both roles, and the honest answer from our data is that they can, right up until the first moment the two roles disagree about whether something is finished.
Review outcomes weekly against the month-0 baseline, not activity against the plan.
Markham Institute, The State of Mid-Market Transformation 2026, MKM-R-2026-014, v2.1 (July 2026). Citation permitted with attribution.