The New Executive Will Want a Different System. Plan for It Before They Arrive.

The new CFO starts on a Monday. By Friday they have asked the question every implementation team dreads: why this system? The analysis is done, the scoping is done, the migration is on the calendar, and the new person at the top would like something else. That is not a freak event. It is one of the most predictable risks in any AMS or ERP project, and the cheapest insurance against it costs an afternoon.

Leaders move. In Challenger, Gray & Christmas's count of announced US CEO exits, the Government/Non-Profit category logged 344 departures from January through August of this year, more than any other industry it tracks.¹ That is up 9% from the 316 in the same stretch of 2025,¹ which ended with 427 exits in the category for the full year, again the most of any industry.² It is a count, not a rate, and it lumps government agencies in with nonprofits, so it says nothing precise about associations. But it is high, and up on 2025, even as CEO exits across all industries fell 18% over the same eight months.¹

Now put that next to what sinks projects. In PMI's 2020 Pulse of the Profession survey of project professionals worldwide, 37% of respondents named a change in their organization's priorities among the primary causes of their failed projects, the most-cited cause, and 21% named inadequate sponsor support.³ That survey spans every industry, and a new executive is only one way priorities change. But a new CFO or ED is the fastest way I know to change priorities and lose your sponsor in the same week.

What that looks like from the inside

I have lived this one. On a client ERP implementation, we had done months of analysis, process optimization and scoping, and we were about to migrate to the new version. Then the CFO left, and the new CFO arrived wanting completely different software. Which was fine, but it just took time to pivot. We showed the new CFO the plusses and minuses of their choice against what the team had decided. They eventually got on board, and the implementation was very successful. It also meant bringing a lot of negative stakeholders back on board along the way. A great yet painful journey.

Here is what I took from it. The pivot was survivable because the team could show its reasoning. The conversation happened on paper, both options side by side, rather than as a contest over who remembered what. The failure mode is the version where the reasoning lives in people's heads, and those people have left the building.

The recipe card

Most families have a dish only one person can really make. The recipe card says "a pinch of this." The good card has notes in the margin: tried it with less sugar, it went flat. Nobody argues about the sugar next time, because the card already says what happened. A decision record is that card for your platform choice.

The idea is not mine. In the 2011 essay that popularized the architecture decision record, Michael Nygard called the motivation behind decisions one of the hardest things to track on a project.⁴ Without it, he wrote, a newcomer has two choices: "Blindly accept the decision," or "Blindly change it."⁴ He was writing about software architecture, not vendor selection, but the newcomer he describes could just as easily be your new CFO. His format is meant to run "one or two pages long" and to list every consequence, not only the flattering ones.⁴ I use a lighter version tuned for platform choices.

What to write this week

Pick the biggest platform decision you have made or are about to make: the AMS, the ERP, the event system. Open a blank document and fill in these lines, and stop when the page is full.

• What we chose. The vendor or approach, in a sentence.
• What we rejected, and why. Each serious alternative and the real reason it lost. Not "it wasn't a fit." The actual reason: the cost, a missing integration, a reference call that went badly.
• What would change our mind. The conditions under which this choice should be reopened, such as a price increase past a set line, a promised feature that never ships, or a change in strategy. This is the line that turns a new executive's challenge into a normal event instead of a crisis.
• Who signed off. Names, roles, and the date.

An operations lead can do this with no new budget, no vendor, no migration, and no SQL. You are not producing a report. You are writing down what the team already knows, while the team still knows it. If the choice was made long ago, write it anyway, and mark which reasons you are reconstructing rather than remembering.

Here is how you know you need it. Ask the question the new executive will ask: why did we pick this vendor? If the answer is "ask Pat, she ran the selection," you have no record. If the "what we rejected" line cannot be filled in without calling someone who no longer works there, you have no record. If the only paper trail is the winning vendor's proposal deck, you have a sales document, not a record.

When the new executive arrives

Then comes the part that takes some grace. When the new CFO or ED says they would prefer a different platform, treat it as a legitimate input, not an attack. Yes, and let's put it on the same page. Add their option next to the ones you weighed, run it against the same criteria, and fill in the same lines. Sometimes they will be right, and the record makes that easy to see. Sometimes the comparison shows why the team landed where it did, and the new executive gets to reach that conclusion themselves instead of being told. Either way, you are comparing two options on paper, not relitigating months of analysis from memory.

And if the new executive's instinct is to swap the whole platform, that is a fair moment to ask whether swapping platforms is the real fix at all, which is the argument in Stop migrating between AMS platforms. The same logic runs through why your architecture shouldn't consolidate just because the platform is: the decisions that last are the ones you can explain.

Quick takes

The finance seat turns over everywhere. Russell Reynolds Associates counted 316 incoming CFOs in 2025 across the large listed companies it tracks in 12 global stock indices, up 10% on 2024 and a seven-year high.⁵ CFO departures in those same indices rose to 262 in 2025, from 256 in 2024.⁶ These are big public companies, not associations, so read it only as a signal. But in an AMS or ERP project the CFO often holds the budget, and that is the seat worth planning around.

Long tenure cuts both ways. In BoardSource's 2023 survey of 410 chief executives of US public charities, median tenure was seven years and the average was 9.2.⁷ BoardSource notes that its sample leans toward small to mid-sized public charities focused on direct service delivery, and these are stable leaders, not churning ones. My read is that it argues for the record rather than against it: when a long-serving leader does leave, a lot of unwritten reasoning leaves with them.

A record is how a newcomer becomes a sponsor. PMI's 2018 Pulse found that organizations with actively engaged executive sponsors on more than 80% of their projects reported 40% more successful projects than those with sponsors on fewer than 50%.⁸ That is self-reported and a correlation, and it says nothing about sponsor turnover. Still, I suspect a new executive who has read the reasoning, and argued with it, is far more likely to become that engaged sponsor than one handed a project they never chose.

Worth a read

Documenting Architecture Decisions, by Michael Nygard. The short essay that popularized decision records. Written for software teams; borrow the habit, not the jargon.

PMI's Pulse of the Profession appendix. The raw survey tables behind the causes of failed projects. Worth scanning for which causes are actually within your control.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas on CEO exits. The monthly count behind the turnover figures above. A newer edition will likely be out by the time you read this, so check it.

My guess is that the association that handles its next leadership change well will not be the one that picked the best vendor. It will be the one that can hand the new executive a page and say: here is why, go ahead and argue with it.

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From the Mind of Ravi Rooprai is a weekly column on association tech, data, and AI. Read the perspectives for the longer arguments behind it.

Researched with AI assistance and fact-checked against primary sources. The analysis, judgment, and writing are mine. How this column is made →