Fixed scope
An independent read on whether the programme will actually deliver.
Independent assessment of whether a live digital or transformation programme will deliver, while there is still time to change course.
- 2–3 weeks · written report + readout
- Findings, risks, and recommended changes
What prompts the call
- The programme has been amber for two quarters. Status is green at the top and red three levels down, and everyone can see the gap except the report.
- A gate is coming that nobody is confident of passing, and the people who know why cannot say so without it reading as blame.
- A new sponsor has inherited a programme they did not shape, and needs an honest baseline before they own the consequences.
- The business case is being quoted in steering meetings and its assumptions stopped being true some time ago.
How it runs
Stakeholder interviews, artefacts, governance and delivery data. Written findings for the steering group.
Week 1
Interviews
Fifteen to twenty-five conversations — sponsor, programme lead, delivery leads, architecture, the vendor, and a sample of the people doing the work. An hour each, all confidential, findings attributed to roles and never to names. Without that last part the second round of interviews in any organisation tells you nothing.
Week 1–2
Evidence
Business case, plan, risk register, architecture decisions, governance minutes, and delivery data from whatever tool the teams already use. What the documents claim, set against what the data shows and what people say. The gaps between those three are usually the finding.
Week 2
Testing the findings
Drafts go back to the people who supplied the evidence, so factual errors surface before the steering group sees them. A report dismissed on a technicality by the one person it inconveniences has achieved nothing.
Week 3
Readout
Ninety minutes with the steering group. A working session, not a presentation — the findings on the table and time to argue with them. I would rather be challenged in the room than agreed with politely and ignored.
What you get
On the table.
- A written report of twenty to thirty pages: findings, evidence, risks and recommended changes.
- Every finding traced to the evidence behind it, so it can be checked rather than believed.
- Risks rated by likelihood and impact, each with a proposed owner.
- Recommendations split into what must happen before the next gate and what can wait.
- A ninety-minute readout with the steering group.
- An anonymised interview synthesis, where the sponsor wants the unfiltered signal.
What I need from you.
- A sponsor willing to hear the answer, including the version where the problem is above the programme.
- Access to the people doing the work, not only the people reporting on it.
- The artefacts as they are. Tidying them first costs a week and removes the evidence.
- Roughly an hour each from fifteen to twenty-five people.
When this is the wrong call
- You need someone to own the fix rather than name it. That is interim programme leadership.
- The decision has already been taken and the review would be cover for it. I will decline, and say why.
- The programme is less than a month old. There is nothing yet to assess.
- What you want is a vendor audit or a contractual dispute assessment. Different work, different specialist.
Questions
- Will the team know they are being reviewed?
- Yes, and they should. Covert reviews produce guarded interviews and worthless findings. What stays confidential is who said what — findings are attributed to roles, never to names.
- What happens if the findings implicate the sponsor?
- They go in the report. A review that can only find fault below the person who commissioned it is not independent, and everyone in the room knows it. That is agreed before the engagement starts, not discovered at the readout.
- Can the report go to the board or to an auditor?
- It is written so that it can. Findings are evidenced and traceable, which is what a board or an external auditor will ask for first.