Organizational Readiness as a Driver of Digital Transformation Success: A Project Management Perspective

Abstract

Digital transformation (DT) has become a strategic imperative, yet a large share of initiatives fall short of their objectives, and the evidence increasingly locates the cause in organizational rather than technological factors. This study examines organizational readiness as a driver of DT success from a project management (PM) perspective, arguing that readiness translates into results primarily through disciplined project execution. Drawing on current literature, the paper conceptualizes readiness along six dimensions, leadership and strategy, culture and change capacity, digital skills and competence, technology and data infrastructure, governance and resources, and stakeholder engagement, and specifies a conceptual model in which PM capability mediates the readiness-to-success relationship. The analytical apparatus is formalized through a readiness index, multiple regression, mediation decomposition, and reliability and validity measures, and is illustrated with twelve figures spanning a conceptual model, a readiness radar, standardized effect sizes, a mediation path, a maturity-versus-success curve, an inter-dimension correlation matrix, and a failure-cause Pareto. The synthesis indicates that leadership and culture exert the strongest effects, that readiness benefits are substantially transmitted through PM capability, and that success probability rises sharply with readiness maturity. The paper concludes with a staged PM implementation framework for building readiness and a discussion of why headline failure statistics should be interpreted with care. A research-style article synthesizing current evidence.  coefficients and case profiles are used to demonstrate the analytical logic; they are not drawn from a single primary dataset.