Russell Buzby

The APS Reform program reached a revealing milestone in early 2026: 54 of its 59 initiatives were either complete or in active delivery. On the surface that sounds like the home stretch. In reality it is the most fragile phase of any reform of this scale, the point at which the difficult but clean work of policy design is behind you and the messier work of embedding begins. Embedding is where reforms either take root in culture and practice or quietly evaporate once central attention moves somewhere else. The Commonwealth is not short of examples of the second outcome.

That transition just lost its architect. APS Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer announced his resignation in late January 2026, mid-embedding, to “move on and contribute in a different way” (Australian Government News, 2026). No permanent successor has been named. The significance of the timing is not that no one else can do the job: the APS is rich in capable senior people, and the embedding work is not a one-person task. The significance is that the architect of a reform program is usually the person holding together the political coalition that gave the reform its licence to be awkward. Once that person leaves, every remaining implementation decision has to be re-litigated on its own merits, without the political cover the original coalition provided. Reforms in the embedding phase are particularly vulnerable to that kind of coalition drift, because their value is cumulative and the case for each individual step is rarely compelling in isolation.

A study in the March 2026 research digest sharpens why this matters beyond one departure. Alsuhaimi (2026), writing in the International Review of Management and Marketing, reports a structural equation modelling study of 384 public sector managers in Saudi Arabia’s National Transformation Program, which examined how governance mechanisms actually produce strategic implementation success in public sector transformations. The headline finding is that governance mechanisms explain 67 per cent of variance in implementation outcomes. That is a large effect and consistent with what practitioners would expect: good governance matters.

The critical finding sits in the moderating variables. Governance effectiveness was substantially higher, by a margin the paper quantifies carefully, in organisations where change readiness and resource availability were already high at the point governance reforms were introduced. In other words, governance structures do their work, but only when the organisational groundwork has already been laid. The same reforms, applied to an organisation that is not ready for them, explain far less variance in success. Alsuhaimi’s interpretation is blunt by academic standards: transformation programmes in emerging markets should assess and build readiness capacity before deploying governance reforms rather than applying universal frameworks on the assumption that structure will drive behaviour.

Saudi Arabia is not Australia, and the Alsuhaimi sample is not the APS. But the finding is not a culturally specific one. It is a claim about the sequence in which governance and readiness interact, and that sequence is the thing worth importing into the current Australian debate.

The debate that finding should sharpen most urgently is the Defence Delivery Agency, which is now taking shape as the biggest reform to Defence procurement in over fifty years. The DDA merges three existing acquisition bodies into a single agency under a National Armaments Director, with Minister Marles citing 28 major projects running a combined 97 years late as the rationale (Marles, 2026). The policy logic for consolidation is defensible. The problem is that ASPI’s analysis of the DDA’s stand-up warns that the reorganisation risks transferring existing mindsets and culture into a new structure that simply maintains them (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2026), which is precisely the scenario Alsuhaimi’s data tells us to expect when governance is deployed ahead of readiness. The numbers involved are not abstract. Defence spending is approaching $60 billion a year now and projected to pass $100 billion by 2034. The stakes for getting the readiness-governance sequence right are measured in capability programs that are already behind schedule and already expensive.

There is a second piece of this picture that deserves attention, which is the Digital Transformation Agency’s Major Digital Projects Report (DTA, 2026). The report documents a portfolio of digital reform work where similar readiness questions apply: large workforce shifts, unfamiliar operating models, uneven in-house capability, and external delivery partners doing work that the internal workforce does not yet have the maturity to govern well. The DTA report is largely procedural on its surface. Read against the Alsuhaimi findings, it is a catalogue of what the readiness gap looks like in practice: business cases that assume capability the organisation does not yet have, risk registers that do not reflect the workforce’s actual confidence with the new tooling, and embedding plans that were written as an afterthought to the original transformation design.

The broader pattern here is not unique to Defence or DTA. It is the same pattern visible in Australian megaproject delivery, where structural answers have been reached for repeatedly in place of the harder work of building cultural and workforce readiness. Inland Rail, Snowy 2.0 and the WSA metro connection all started with governance structures that looked tight on paper and fell apart in contact with workforce, political and cultural conditions the structure had assumed would be stable. The Moore et al. (2026) work on political opportunity structure, which I wrote about separately, names one part of that failure pattern. The Alsuhaimi findings name another. Both converge on the same practical conclusion: the governance box on the organisational chart is not the primary lever, and treating it as if it were keeps producing the same disappointments.

For change practitioners working in or around the APS, the more useful response to this situation is not to argue against governance reform. Governance reform is largely correct and largely necessary, and the design work behind the APS Reform program has been better than most of the critics give it credit for. The useful response is to push hard on readiness before structure, particularly during the embedding phase when attention is already drifting. Readiness in this context means clear accountability for who owns the reform inside each agency once central coordination fades, meaningful workforce capability investment, properly funded change and communications support (the two disciplines most frequently collapsed into “the project manager will do it”), and honest measurement of how much behavioural change has actually occurred rather than how many initiatives have been ticked off.

Embedding is the phase nobody writes a media release about, and that is part of why it is fragile. The Alsuhaimi data gives the argument for investing in it a harder empirical edge than change practitioners have previously had. Governance explains 67 per cent of implementation success. Readiness is the moderator that decides whether that 67 per cent lands in an organisation where it can actually work.

Restructuring without readiness is how you spend a decade rearranging the organisational chart while the same problems compound underneath it, and the Defence Delivery Agency is about to find out whether this iteration of that pattern ends differently from the last one.

References

Alsuhaimi, M. (2026). Governance mechanisms and strategic implementation success in public sector transformations: The moderating roles of change readiness and resource availability. International Review of Management and Marketing, 16(3), 41-51. https://doi.org/10.32479/irmm.22548

Australian Government News. (2026, January 26). APS Commission chief resigns. Government News.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (2026). Analysis of the Defence Delivery Agency announcement. ASPI.

Digital Transformation Agency. (2026). Major digital projects report. Commonwealth of Australia.

Marles, R. (2026, February). Address to ADM Congress, Canberra. Minister for Defence.

Moore, R., Gil, N. and colleagues. (2026, April 1). Political opportunity structure and stakeholder engagement on the Bisri Dam megaproject. Project Management Journal.

The Mandarin. (2026, March). APS Reform implementation coverage. The Mandarin.