Bringing red programmes back to predictable execution.
How I bring tier-1 customer programmes back once they have gone past normal escalation, while keeping the customer relationship.
Signals the programme is no longer self-correcting.
Patterns I look for. When more than three are present at once, the programme needs executive-level intervention.
Steering committee fatigue
Same risks reappearing month after month with no decisive resolution.
Programme plan has stopped updating
RAG status is green; underlying plan has been frozen in place for sprints.
RAID inflation
RAID grows and ages. Risks become 'normal' and stop being treated as risks.
Customer escalating sideways
Sponsor goes around the delivery team to escalate through commercial channels.
Vendor blame loop
Vendors openly attributing slippage to each other in steering forums.
Senior departures
Quiet exits among delivery leads and architects on the programme.
Scope drift without re-baseline
Scope changes accumulate without a formal re-baseline of plan, cost or expectations.
Acceptance debt
Items shipped but unaccepted by the customer; live system in unclear state.
Steering reports diverging from reality
What gets reported up and what the team experiences daily are different programmes.
What I do in the first 30 days.
The first month sets the direction for the next quarter, so it follows a fixed sequence.
Read the programme
- Meet delivery leads, architects, sponsor, and customer counterparts.
- Reconstruct RAID, plan, acceptance log, and steering history.
- Separate facts from assumptions, politics, and optimism.
- Identify the sponsor’s concerns and where the customer has stopped trusting the plan.
- Build an independent view of delivery reality.
Stabilise & diagnose
- Stop work that does not move the programme, and put decisions in fewer hands.
- Rebuild risk, dependency, and decision visibility.
- Identify the gap between promise, plan, and capacity.
- Test hypotheses on what must be re-baselined.
- Draft the customer recovery roadmap.
Re-baseline & commit
- Formalise the new scope, plan, cost, and expectation baseline.
- Reset governance, escalation paths, and decision rights.
- Reconfirm customer and executive alignment.
- Establish the 30/60/90-day recovery cadence.
- Return the programme to predictable execution.
The six-stage model.
The model behind the banking recovery case on this site. Each stage depends on the one before it.
Stabilise
Stop the drift, slow down bad decisions and re-establish a single source of truth.
Diagnose
Read the programme from the inside: RAID, dependencies, customer signal, team load.
Re-baseline
Reset scope, plan and expectations against what the team can deliver.
Govern
Install the executive layer: steering, reporting, decision rights, escalation routes.
Recover trust
Repair the customer relationship by reporting evidence on a regular cadence, with visible ownership.
Institutionalise
Lift lessons into the operating model so the next programme doesn’t fail the same way.
What a recovery leaves in place.
Six artefacts, each in place by the end.