Independent programme assurance, delivery oversight and recovery — for sponsors who need an honest read on whether a programme will land.
Project Management & Implementation
Programmes fail for governance reasons long before they fail for technology reasons. The schedule drift, the scope expansion, the vendor renegotiation, the loss of executive confidence — all of these are predictable and most of them are preventable. Our delivery advisory is built around the disciplines that keep programmes on the rails, and the recovery capability to put them back when they are not.
We provide independent project directors, programme assurance leads and PMO support. Our practitioners have run programmes large and small across financial services, healthcare, public sector, manufacturing, retail and insurance. We do not displace the internal team; we work alongside them.
What we do
An experienced programme or project director engaged on a defined scope, with full accountability for the delivery outcome. Useful when the programme is too important to leave to internal capacity alone, or when the internal team needs senior reinforcement for a critical phase.
An ongoing assurance role reporting to the programme board, with defined review checkpoints and explicit escalation triggers. We do not run the programme; we provide the independent view the board needs to make timely decisions.
Design, setup and operation of a programme management office for the duration of a major initiative. We deliver an operational PMO that survives the engagement and leaves the organisation with the templates, reports and governance cadence to continue.
An intervention role for a programme that has lost its way. The first two weeks are diagnostic — establishing the baseline that everyone can agree on. The work that follows is the scope reset, the vendor renegotiation, the governance redesign and the benefits re-baseline that puts the programme back on track.
How we work
There is no methodology that guarantees programme success. There are disciplines that make success more likely. We bring the same set of disciplines to every programme we work on — baseline and benefits, governance cadence, decision rights, scope discipline, vendor relationship management and the willingness to have the difficult conversations early.
The work typically begins with a baseline. What is the actual schedule, the actual cost, the actual scope, the actual benefits, the actual risks? Most struggling programmes have lost their grip on at least one of these. The baseline is the foundation for everything that follows. It is uncomfortable for some stakeholders and that is usually a signal that it is necessary.
From the baseline, we work with the programme director and the steering committee to reset scope, schedule and cost as required — explicitly, with documented trade-offs, with executive sponsorship for each reset decision. We do not pretend that a reset is anything other than what it is.
The honest answer is not always recovery. Sometimes the right answer is to halt the programme, retire the vendor, or accept that the original benefits case was overstated. We will say so when it is.
Engagement
Typical engagements range from a four-week diagnostic to a multi-year embedded role. The structure is fixed-fee where the scope is known, and capped time-and-materials where the scope needs to be discovered. We do not bill by the day for open-ended advisory.
Every engagement has a written deliverable, a price and a date. The board can read the engagement letter and know what they are buying.
The person you meet in the first conversation is the person who does the work. We do not have a junior pyramid.
We tell you what we believe is right. If the conclusion is uncomfortable, we still tell you. The board can rely on the advice because we are not afraid to give it.
Every engagement leaves the client team better able to manage the next one without us. We do not create dependency.
Programme in trouble, or about to be?
Common questions
We are independent advisers, not part of your delivery team. We sit on the sponsor's side: we attend steering committees, review the plan and the risks, and tell the sponsor plainly whether the programme is on track and whether the status reports are honest. We do not line-manage the project managers — that would compromise the independence.
Often, yes. The majority of recoveries fail not because the technology is broken but because the scope, the funding or the governance was never realistic. We run a structured diagnosis — schedule, budget, benefits, risks, stakeholder confidence — then produce a recovery plan the executive can resubmit to the board. If the programme should simply be stopped, we will tell you that too.
We do not have a methodology we sell. We match the governance to the work: a regulated, capital-intensive programme benefits from structured stage-gate control; a product delivery team benefits from short iterative cycles. The job of assurance is to hold the delivery to whatever discipline was actually chosen, not to relabel it quarterly.
One page, weekly: status, the three decisions needed this fortnight, and the top risks with owners. Quarterly, a short board pack that states whether benefits tracking is still credible. We keep it deliberately thin because the point of assurance is signal, not paperwork.
A defined scope — typically a named programme or portfolio, a fixed number of steering meetings per month, and a written monthly report — agreed and priced up front. It usually runs for one or two quarters, extendable by mutual agreement. There are no timesheets.