A Government Can Change Overnight. An Institution Cannot.
Morocco's new government raises a question every leader should consider: how do you turn a strategic decision into a change that actually works?
In this article
On 16 October 2026, King Mohammed VI presided over the appointment of Morocco's new government, led by Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri. The new cabinet includes portfolios covering public performance, digital transformation and administrative reform, as detailed in the official government announcement.
What interests me is what happens after the appointments.
A minister can establish priorities. A CEO can approve a restructuring. A board can release a budget. But an organization has its own processes, legal obligations, people, habits and constraints. Those do not change on the day a decision is made.
I see a familiar engineering question here: how do you move from an intended result to a system that can deliver it consistently?
A good decision can still produce a disappointing result
Across engineering project leadership, semiconductor manufacturing and running my own business, I have learned to look beyond the decision itself.
In an industrial environment, a qualified machine does not guarantee that the complete production line will achieve its target output. Performance depends on materials arriving, upstream and downstream capacity, process variation, maintenance, quality controls and the decisions people make when something goes wrong.
Take a machine that completes an operation in three minutes. If parts spend two days waiting for their next operation, investing in a faster machine may produce little improvement for the customer. The constraint was never those three minutes. It was the flow around them.
Organizations create similar situations, although their objectives and accountability differ.
A department may meet its targets while the citizen or customer still waits. A manager may be responsible for a deadline without having authority over the approvals holding it up.
That is why I would never begin a transformation by assuming that the most visible problem is the real one.
Follow one request all the way through
Consider a hypothetical public administration that wants to make construction authorizations faster.
An application is submitted online, assigned a number and routed to the appropriate department. The platform works as intended. Yet the applicant continues waiting.
I would want to examine the complete journey, not just the dashboard of the department receiving applications.
What happens after submission? Does a missing document send the request back to the beginning? Are two services checking the same information? How long does an approval take to perform, and how long does it sit in a queue? Which decisions require a legally designated official, and which delays come from avoidable hand-offs?
Morocco already has a real digital authorization infrastructure. The Rokhas national service centralizes and digitizes territorial permit applications. My hypothetical case is not a claim that Rokhas suffers from the problems described here. It illustrates why technology and organizational design need to be considered together.
Now suppose the review team shortens its processing time, but the final approval stage cannot absorb the additional files.
Locally, performance improves. For the applicant, perhaps nothing changes.
The bottleneck has moved.
This is an important distinction to make before celebrating a project milestone.
The UK Government Service Standard follows a similar principle: public services should address the user's complete problem across organizational boundaries, rather than begin with a predetermined technological solution.
In a public institution, that work also means protecting due process, accessibility and legally required controls. Faster is not necessarily better if decisions become less reliable or harder to challenge.
Change management starts with decisions, not presentations
If I were asked to structure a transformation like this, my first task would be to agree on the expected outcome and establish a reliable baseline.
How many days does an application take from submission to final decision? What proportion requires rework? How do cases differ by type? What does the applicant experience, including people who cannot comfortably use digital channels?
Next, I would map the real workflow with the people who operate it.
This means listening carefully to frontline employees and middle managers, not only reading procedures. They understand which exceptions are common, where informal workarounds exist and why apparently simple changes can create unexpected workloads.
Then comes the difficult part: assigning ownership across organizational boundaries.
Who has the authority to change a procedure? Who can authorize an exception? Who resolves a conflict between two departments? Where law or regulation limits a proposed improvement, does the project need a different process, a policy decision or a change in ambition?
Responsibility without the means to act is not a delivery model.
I would also examine what people are actually being asked to adopt.
If a digital process introduces additional data entry while the old reporting requirement remains, resistance may be a reasonable response to duplicated work. Training alone cannot solve that.
The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, updated in 2022, explicitly considers organizational resources, leadership, individual roles and the implementation process. These factors help explain why the same technical solution may work differently in different settings.
Only then would I recommend a controlled pilot with a defined scope, named process owners, clear escalation routes, staff support and agreed safeguards.
The pilot must include difficult cases, not only the easy ones.
If processing time improves but errors or unequal access increase, I would investigate and adjust before scaling. If another queue becomes the constraint, the implementation plan must evolve with the evidence.
This is also why I prefer measuring outcomes rather than simply reporting activities.
The UK Government Digital Service's performance guidance recommends combining transaction metrics with research into the end-to-end user experience, instead of relying exclusively on digital analytics.
A platform being live is a milestone. A service working better for its users is a result.
What this means for companies — and for Morocco
Imagine a manufacturing company launching a maintenance-management system.
Work orders become digital, technicians receive training and the implementation deadline is respected.
Yet equipment breakdowns continue because production targets discourage planned maintenance, spare parts are delayed and recurring failures have no clear owner.
The problem may be less about the software itself than the operating model surrounding it.
The comparison has limits. A public agency answers to law and citizens; a private company operates under different commercial and governance obligations. Still, both require leaders to understand interdependent work, make trade-offs visible and provide people with the authority and resources needed to execute decisions.
The OECD's Digital Government Outlook 2026 reports that 75% of OECD countries do not evaluate whether investments in digital technologies and AI achieve their intended results.
That finding matters because it captures a risk extending beyond government: organizations can become very good at delivering projects without learning enough about the improvements those projects actually produce.
For me, a successful transformation must answer three questions with evidence: did the outcome improve, did the people doing the work adopt a workable process, and can the improvement continue after the project team leaves?
Morocco's new government provides an occasion for this discussion, not a prediction about what any minister will achieve.
The harder work lies in the distance between an announcement and the daily experience of a citizen, employee or customer.
That is where I believe change management earns its value.
Anas BOURAS Founder, ALFABE Design & Engineering
I work with organizations to diagnose complex operational problems and turn improvement plans into practical, measurable execution.
References
- Kingdom of Morocco. SM le Roi préside la cérémonie de nomination des membres du nouveau gouvernement. 16 October 2026. Official announcement.
- Ministry responsible for Moroccans Residing Abroad. Single national point of contact for all territorial permit applications. Undated. Official Rokhas service description.
- UK Government Digital Service. Solve a whole problem for users. Published 8 May 2019; updated 29 January 2026. GOV.UK Service Manual.
- Damschroder, L. J., et al. The updated Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research based on user feedback. Implementation Science, 29 October 2022. Research paper.
- UK Government Digital Service. Measuring the success of your service. Published 6 August 2018. GOV.UK Service Manual.
- OECD. Digital Government Outlook 2026: From Foundations to Transformational Impact. 15 June 2026. OECD report.