A field guide for executives and programme sponsors — patterns we see repeatedly in the months before a programme needs intervention.
Most failing programmes do not fail suddenly. They drift. The trajectory is visible months — sometimes a year — before the moment of crisis, if you know what to look for. This article describes five patterns we see repeatedly across the programmes we are asked to recover. None of them, individually, means the programme is doomed. Any two of them, together, mean the programme needs attention soon.
This sounds counterintuitive. Surely a programme with no red status is healthy? In our experience the opposite is usually true. A genuinely healthy programme will have at least one or two open risks that the programme manager is tracking honestly. A programme with no red on the status report is a programme where the reporting has been smoothed to the point of being useless.
The test is simple. Ask the programme manager, in a private conversation, "What is keeping you awake at night about this programme?" If the answer is the same as what is on the status report, the reporting is honest. If the answer is different — and longer — the status report is fiction.
Every programme has governance forums: steering committees, working groups, design authorities. Their job is to make decisions. When the governance forums start to feel like theatre — meeting regularly, talking about the same things, deferring decisions to "offline" conversations — the programme has started to fail.
The reason is usually that the decisions are politically difficult. They involve re-prioritisation, re-scoping, or the admission that an earlier estimate was wrong. The governance forum is the wrong place to have those conversations; the executive sponsor is. If the executive sponsor is not having them, the programme is being run in the hope that the problem will resolve itself. It will not.
Every programme that goes through a formal business case approval has, somewhere, a document that justifies the investment on the basis of expected benefits. The benefits might be cost reduction, revenue improvement, risk reduction or compliance. Whatever they are, they were quantified at a specific point in time, against specific assumptions.
Assumptions age. Markets move. The business changes. A benefits case that has not been refreshed in twelve months is, in most cases, a benefits case that no longer reflects reality. The first question to ask of any programme that has been running for more than a year is: when was the benefits case last validated against current business conditions?
If the executive team cannot answer, in one sentence, what the programme is going to deliver next quarter, the programme is not being run. It is being attended.
This is a subtle one. A well-run programme has a broad set of stakeholders who are engaged, informed and capable of representing the programme in different forums. A programme in trouble has a small set of people — usually two or three — who know what is going on and who respond to every question, every email, every request. They become the bottleneck. They also become exhausted, defensive and increasingly isolated from the broader organisation.
The question to ask: name three people, in three different parts of the business, who can talk fluently about what this programme is delivering. If the answer is the same two or three names every time, the programme has become too dependent on a small group of insiders.
This one is specific to programmes with significant vendor involvement. In a well-run programme the vendor relationship is one risk among many. In a programme in trouble, the vendor relationship has usually become the dominant risk. The vendor is missing milestones, or the contract is being renegotiated, or the vendor's delivery team has changed three times in six months, or the vendor and the client are no longer aligned on what "done" means.
The question to ask: of the top five risks on the programme, how many involve the vendor? If the answer is three or more, the programme is no longer in your control in any meaningful sense.
If you recognise two or more of these patterns in a programme you are responsible for, the most important thing is to act now rather than later. Programme failure is not a moment; it is a process, and it accelerates. The cost of intervention grows roughly with the square of the delay. Bringing in an independent pair of eyes — even for a short diagnostic — is almost always cheaper than waiting to see what happens next.
We are often engaged at the moment of crisis. We would much rather be engaged twelve months earlier. If you are worried about a programme and would value a confidential conversation about what an early intervention might look like, please get in touch.