Bringing red programmes back to predictable execution.
A specialist offer for boards, CEOs, COOs, and CxOs whose tier-1 customer programmes have moved past normal escalation — without burning the customer relationship in the process.
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 but 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.
A structured recovery cadence. The first month sets the trajectory for the next quarter.
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 sponsor concerns and customer trust fractures.
- Build an independent view of delivery reality.
Stabilise & diagnose
- Stop low-leverage activity and concentrate decision-making.
- 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 same model behind the recovery cases on this site — sequenced so each stage creates the conditions for the next.
Stabilise
Stop the bleed. Slow bad-decision cadence. 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 actually deliver.
Govern
Install the executive layer — steering, reporting, decision rights, escalation routes.
Recover trust
Repair the customer relationship through evidence, cadence, and visible accountability.
Institutionalise
Lift lessons into the operating model so the next programme doesn’t fail the same way.
What you have at the end.
A recovery engagement is judged on the artefacts and the trajectory it leaves behind — not on the heroics during it.