We are brought in to set one up properly, or to recover one that has drifted. Reorganisations, ERP replacements, shared services and business cases that had to clear scrutiny, all of it in the public sector.
The council that signed your contracts will stop existing. Every agreement has to be novated, terminated or re-let before it does, by officers who are building the new organisation at the same time.
Structure charts are the easy part. Deciding who decides, and which inherited way of working survives, is what takes eighteen months.
Business cases fail when the chosen option was never tested against the others, or the benefits were written to fit a decision already taken.
Your integrator has a plan and a change control process. What decides the outcome is whether you can make decisions at the speed that plan assumes.
Reporting is the last thing to turn red, because green is the answer with the fewest consequences. By the time it changes, the decisions that caused it were taken months ago.
There is work that has to be delivered and nobody to deliver it. The post is vacant, recruitment takes months, and the date will not wait.
Six things, narrowly defined. Each page sets out the situation it deals with and what you get. We would rather do these well than everything adequately.
Vesting day does not move. Everything else has to.
Read more → 02A new structure is not a new organisation.
Read more → 03A decision is only as good as the case that survives scrutiny.
Read more → 04New systems rarely fail for technical reasons.
Read more → 05A programme stops moving long before anyone reports it.
Read more → 06You need the work done. You do not need another timesheet.
Read more →A national platform rated red on arrival. A procurement four months from a deadline nobody could move. Nine organisations that had to agree one set of numbers. A savings target nobody had a route to.
OSCAR2 consolidates public spending reporting across more than 500 public bodies and the devolved administrations. We took it on rated red, with the business case approved and nothing standing behind it: no plan, no programme office, no delivery mechanism. Approval had been mistaken for a start.
A Brexit-critical biosecurity procurement had stopped moving against a deadline the department could not renegotiate. The capability had to be contracted and standing on the day the UK left, or a statutory function would have had nothing behind it.
Nine organisations meant nine sets of baseline data, nine finance functions with different definitions of the same cost, and nine executive teams whose interests did not automatically align. It needed Green Book investment approval before a penny could be committed.
Two councils, the same problem: a savings target, and a portfolio of individually sound projects that was not collectively going to meet it. Both brought into one governed programme, with the operating model redesigned where the savings actually sat.
Weeks to diagnose. Months to deliver. Most clients keep us a year or more.
Two directors on every engagement. Where the work needs more hands, associates we have delivered with before, whom you meet and approve before they start.
A position you can defend, in writing, and a team that can carry it after we go.
Further engagements available on request
Very good at bringing order to chaos. A doer who gets stuff done.
Charlie Adan · Former Chief Executive, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames
You have worked with others. You have seen the theatre: the senior partner who pitches and then disappears, the expensive juniors who do the work, the deck that stays green until the week it cannot, and the supplier RAID log that turns every risk into a client-side challenge.
We have sat on the other side of that programme board. One of us came out of the Big Four; both of us have run programmes from inside the client at central government scale. So we know what a supplier will and will not put in writing, and which entries on that risk log are real. Logging a dependency against the client is not the same as solving it. We take hold of what is blocking the programme, whoever it belongs to, and work it alongside your people.
We start by finding out where the programme actually is, which is rarely where the reporting says. Then we rebuild what it needs in order to decide, and put the authority to decide in the room. The directors named below do that work themselves. Where a job needs more hands, you meet and approve whoever joins before they start. We do not implement systems or resell licences, so the answer you get is only ever about what works for you. When we go, your people keep the plan, the skills to run it, and a clear view of what comes next.
Two directors is the point, and it is also the limit. Both of us carry every engagement: one leads it, the other is briefed closely enough to pick it up, and you have both mobile numbers from the first week. Where the work needs more hands we bring associates we have delivered with before, and you meet and approve them before they start. What we will not do is staff a programme we cannot lead ourselves, which means we turn work down. If you need forty people in a room, we are the wrong firm and we will tell you in the first conversation.
Twenty-two years delivering government transformation, brought in when a programme has to be recovered, or set up so it does not come to that.
Fifteen years landing change in organisations that cannot afford to get it wrong. A former Big Four director and a former civil servant, so he has sat on both sides of the same programme board.
Different organisations, same problem: a date that will not move, a case that has to hold, and a client-side team caught between the programme and the service it already runs.
Counties, districts, unitaries and London boroughs, and the new authorities being built out of them.
Registered providers replacing a core system, restructuring services or merging.
Departments, agencies, regulators and public corporations.
Royal Colleges, institutes and membership organisations. We are running a qualifications and professional development transformation at one of them now, where we built the programme assurance function from nothing.
Tell us what you are carrying. If we are the right two people for it, we will say so. If we are not, we will say who is.
The fastest path is a short note describing the situation, the decision you need to make, and when. We read every message ourselves.
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