Recent recoveries.

Took over two months in. The client had assembled a 20-page deck documenting every shortfall and formally requesting termination. They had expected around 40 days of delivered output. They had received roughly five. The relationship had reached the point where formal exit was the only mechanism left.

Diagnosed the root causes in two to three days. The team had never been properly mobilised. No development team had been stood up. No code had been written. The programme manager was running other accounts and was absent from delivery. No backlog with acceptance criteria. No Definition of Done. No sprint structure or cadence. The team believed it was running a discovery phase, but the client had never been told that, nor what would be built, nor that they would not receive the roughly 40 days of output they expected. What existed was a draft solution design and a handful of workshops, and even that was never shared with the client. The termination deck was the client’s only available instrument for expressing that the programme was failing.

Built the backlog from scratch with the tech leads, establishing acceptance criteria and a Definition of Done for every item before a line of code was written. Produced a sprint roadmap with milestones and outcomes the client could track week by week. Reinstated a reporting cadence they could trust. Then absorbed two full client pivots without losing budget discipline. Both redirections were contained within existing budget envelopes.

Delivered a working proof of concept within one month of taking over. The engagement continued. The client’s confidence in the programme improved once I was in the role.

Inherited at one month in. Roughly £20k had been spent against approximately £1,200 of value delivered. The ratio was not a rounding error. It reflected a programme with no delivery machinery at all. No backlog, no governance, no reporting, no ceremonies, no DevOps pipeline. Nothing to build on.

The spend was real. The output was not. There was no team and no delivery machinery, just two consultants optimising the proof of concept, running meetings and workshops while the budget drained. No backlog, no governance, no shared understanding of what was being built, in what order, to what standard. Activity was constant. Progress was close to zero.

Talked to the right people, then built the backlog from scratch, the one that would actually deliver the production-ready product. Assembled a seven-person internal team and informally directed three client-side specialists to build it. Installed the delivery machinery: sprint planning, weekly demos, retros, and a one-page reporting deck that gave the client everything they needed. Scoped hard to Phase 1 to protect the original budget and timeline; everything else went through change control, producing two further CRs.

Landed a production-grade multi-agent platform on the original timeline and within budget.

A £3.5m modernisation programme with no programme governance infrastructure in place. The scope was real, the team was capable, and the client relationship was intact, but the structural machinery that makes a programme this size defensible and navigable had never been built.

The risks and dependencies were real but invisible. Nothing was being captured, so nothing could be managed. The RAID log had 20 entries: a number that bore no relationship to the complexity of a £3.5m programme. Critical dependencies existed in conversations but not in any formal register, which meant they could not be escalated, tracked, or owned.

Built the governance infrastructure from scratch. Grew the RAID log from 20 entries to 130-plus in four weeks, not padding, but systematic identification of what was actually in play, and surfaced critical dependencies six to eight weeks ahead of the client’s own recognition. Wrote a Ways of Working document to set the delivery standard, and coached the technical team to shift their approach, tone, and language for an enterprise-grade client that needed a different touch from the one they were used to. Stood up structured vendor coordination, and pushed for a weekly Design Authority to clear design decisions before they stalled delivery. Reworked resource and cost control too: corrected utilisation and built a clear view of burn rate and resource allocation across monthly, quarterly, and annual horizons.

Secured a three-year, £2m managed service contract through delivery confidence built over the course of the programme.

A £1.2m contact-centre transformation on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Microsoft’s first Copilot-first, AI-powered contact centre, with AI-driven quality assurance built in. Immutable deadlines, a tight budget, and no governance in place.

No governance, no RAID, no delivery structure. The programme had a contract and a deadline but none of the machinery a transformation this visible needs to stay defensible and on track. There was no single view of risk, ownership, or progress.

Mobilised the programme from scratch. Introduced RAID, RACI, and dual-track governance, stood up a reporting cadence, and owned the internal and external stakeholder landscape end to end, building strong rapport with the client’s PM team and CIO.

Reached pilot readiness in four months, on an immutable deadline and within budget, with the programme fully governed and on track. The client’s programme and project managers gave very positive feedback on the contribution and approach throughout.

A £0.5m discovery, design and planning engagement, migrating five business units into a single group tenancy. Contract and SoW negotiations ran so long that, by the time it was signed, barely two days remained before the committed start date. The client’s programme manager wanted a kickoff deck to review and a detailed mobilisation plan up front.

That left roughly a day and a half to mobilise everything: review the contract, resource a large team against fixed, immovable deadlines, and stand up both internal and external kickoffs, producing the kickoff deck for the programme manager to review and writing the detailed plan, all while running other high-profile programmes in parallel.

Reviewed the contract, resourced the team, and ran the internal and external kickoffs back to back. Produced the kickoff deck the programme manager had asked to review and the detailed mobilisation plan. Established governance and brought the CTO, the programme manager, and stakeholders across all five business units onto a shared delivery model from day one.

The full engagement was mobilised within a day and a half, on the committed start date.

A £100k Microsoft Fabric engagement with low SME engagement and a delivery relationship under strain. The technical work was underway, but the client’s subject matter experts were disengaged, which meant key decisions were being deferred or made without the people who needed to own them.

The technical work was sound. The engagement and confidence around it were not. SME disengagement had created a gap between what was being built and what the client felt ownership over. The delivery relationship had frayed to the point where progress was invisible to the people it was meant to serve.

Recovered SME engagement through systematic, visible progress reporting that made the work legible to the people who needed to ratify it. Rebuilt delivery confidence by ensuring every sprint produced something the client could see, test, or decide on. Closed the gap between the team’s output and the client’s sense of ownership.

Delivered the in-scope reports within the available budget. Surfaced quality concerns with the data function internally to the client’s benefit, and maintained strong client confidence in the programme management throughout.

A £120k data platform engagement, mid-delivery, burning budget against a requirement that nobody had fully articulated. Development was active, the team was competent, and the spend was real, but the thing being built was drifting away from what the client actually needed, without anyone formally recognising it.

Identified the client’s real requirement ahead of their own formal articulation of it. Development was heading the wrong way: not through incompetence but through an assumption that the initial brief was complete. The cost of continuing was not just the remaining budget; it was the cost of building the wrong thing and then rebuilding it.

Paused development and budget burn before the divergence compounded. Facilitated a scoped requirements workshop that surfaced the genuine need and produced a refocused delivery plan. Redirected the remaining budget toward the work that would actually solve the problem, within the original funding envelope.

Delivered the right thing inside the original budget.