Related question
Our consultant changed the plan halfway through. Is that a bad sign?
Short answer
Usually the opposite. A mid-course correction means the team learned something in execution that discovery did not surface, and chose to solve the real problem instead of finishing the scoped one. Technically complete and solving the wrong problem is the worse outcome.
We were three weeks into a Phase 1 delivery when we changed direction.
The original scope was clean. Take the daily job schedule from the client's dispatch platform and convert it into optimized routes for drivers. Clear problem, clear solution. Except that was not how the client actually ran her operation.
She does not schedule day by day. She sends each driver a batch of jobs and they self-route through the week. The dispatch platform gets updated afterward as a record, not used as a plan. It had come up in discovery, but not as a hard rule, and we learned how much it mattered only in execution.
Forcing the original model onto that operation would have created a process she did not need and would not use. Technically complete. Solving the wrong problem.
So we stopped, reassessed what she actually needed given how she actually works, and rebuilt Phase 1 around that reality. The outcome stayed the same. The mechanism changed completely.
Mid-course correction is a feature of this work, not a failure. It is a more accurate read. What you should worry about is a partner who never changes anything, because that usually means they are delivering the scope rather than the outcome.