Most transformations are run by people who already have a full-time job. The leader who must change how their function works is the same leader closing a quarter this month. Their calendar was full before the program asked them for anything.
The currency nobody budgets
Programs budget carefully for money, headcount and milestones, and almost never for the minutes they withdraw from the people who have to change. A status template here, a weekly workbook there, a steering pack that needs three inputs from every lead by Thursday. Each one is defensible. Together they add up to a second job, handed to people who already have one.
Nobody refuses it. They postpone. The update slides to next week, then to after the quarter. Registers go stale, reporting goes quiet, and the program stays "on track" because nobody has evidence that it is not. That is a long way from evidence that it is.
Every ask has a price, paid in attention. The office absorbs the overhead; the stakeholder gives the minimum, at the moment it matters, in the place they already are.
Price the ask before you make it
Before sending a template or scheduling a review, write down what it costs one person, in minutes and in things they must open. Then multiply by the people you are asking and the times a year you will ask. A twenty-minute update every two weeks costs each leader more than a full working day a year. You would not spend that much of the sponsor's budget without a second thought. You are spending something scarcer.
Then cut. Most asks reduce to one question with a few fixed answers. The ones that cannot usually belong to the office, not the owner. The one thing it cannot do for an owner is decide, so protect the owner's attention for the decision and do the typing yourself. The office gets more work and the owners get less, which is the right way round.
Count responses before progress
Before any outcome moves, people have to respond: accept the work, say it is already covered, say it is not a priority, say they are blocked. Until they do, you have no status to report, only the office's opinion dressed up as a status. So the first number worth tracking is the answer rate, and I lead with it while the data is thin.
When that number is low, you do not have a progress problem yet. You have a pricing problem.