Seven 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. No backlog with acceptance criteria. No Definition of Done. No sprint structure or cadence. The team was delivering outputs: commits, documents, meetings, without a shared model of what “done” meant or how it would be demonstrated. 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. A ten-person team, seven internal and three client-side, was active, capable, and completely uncoordinated. There was no shared understanding of what was being built, in what order, to what standard. Individual effort was substantial. Collective progress was close to zero.

Rebuilt delivery from scratch across the full team. Backlog, governance, reporting cadence, ceremonies, and DevOps: installed in sequence, each building on the last. Established a rhythm the team could sustain. The pace of visible delivery changed inside two weeks.

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 that did not previously exist. Grew the RAID log from 20 entries to 130-plus in four weeks. Not through padding, but through systematic identification of what was actually in play. Identified critical dependencies six to eight weeks ahead of their formal recognition by the client.

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

A £1.2m voice programme, fragmented across workstreams with no shared governance. Multiple teams were active, each with their own cadence and priorities. The programme existed as a concept and a contract, not as a coordinated delivery effort.

No single view of risk, ownership, or progress existed at programme level. Individual workstreams were reporting internally, but there was no mechanism for surfacing cross-stream dependencies or making integrated decisions. The fragmentation was structural, not behavioural.

Introduced RAID, RACI, and dual-track governance into a previously fragmented programme. Created a shared model of risk and ownership that the whole team could see and work from. Established a programme-level reporting cadence that made cross-stream dependencies visible before they became blockers.

Established full programme governance from a standing start, built an integrated delivery plan covering all workstreams, and left the programme structured and on track. The client’s programme and project managers provided very positive feedback on my contribution and the approach throughout.

A £0.5m discovery, design and planning engagement that had lost alignment across a complex leadership group. Five business units were involved, each with their own interests and interpretation of the programme’s direction. The engagement was stalling. Not because the work was technically difficult, but because no single version of the truth existed.

The problem was misalignment, not capability. Five business units pulling in different directions, with no mechanism for surfacing or resolving the divergence. The CTO, the Programme Manager, and the business unit leads had not been in the same room with the same picture in front of them.

Established full governance for the engagement. Brought the CTO, the Programme Manager, and stakeholders across all five business units into alignment around a shared delivery model. Created the conditions for the engagement to proceed with one version of direction, scope, and priority.

The engagement stabilised within one and a half days.

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.