Five real engagements — an ERP three years late with nothing in production, a regulatory programme with no audit trail, a portfolio reporting green until it wasn't. What prompted the call, what we found, and what changed afterwards.
We work under mutual NDA on every engagement. That's why you won't find client names on this page — and why yours wouldn't appear either. Figures are as recorded at the time of assessment. Client references available under mutual NDA.
A global integrated business planning implementation, three years past its original go-live and $35m over budget, with nothing running in production. What was scoped as a single global template had been customised into seven divergent builds — one per operating business. The systems integrator sat on time-and-materials with no accountability for outcomes, delivering outputs against a plan nobody owned.
A new business leader arrived with a cost-reduction mandate and a hard constraint: delivered inside twelve months.
An independent assessment of the as-is position, scored across our full delivery framework, followed by monthly re-assessments tracking risk profile and trajectory — shared openly with both business and IT leadership. Recommendations targeted root causes rather than symptoms: establish a dedicated staff Product Manager role; move to an integrated DevOps model to break delivery silos; improve governance efficiency and decision velocity; and install independent oversight of vendor performance.
The programme moved from three years of spend with nothing in production to live across all seven operating businesses inside the twelve months.
A regulatory compliance programme that had run in various forms for three years and consumed $25m without delivering. Despite a mandate driven entirely by regulatory obligation, there was no regulatory lead, no documented regulatory requirements, no traceability matrix and no audit trail — nothing linking the obligation to the delivery.
The sector regulator set a hard deadline: decommission an unsupported legacy platform by mid-July, and pass a formal qualification gate under a market-wide regulatory change — or face financial penalties.
A four-week independent assessment scoring all thirteen delivery dimensions, including regulatory readiness, with findings and recommendations against each. We split the recommendations deliberately into two tracks — actions for leadership and actions for the delivery team — because the evidence pointed upward, not down. We then ran working sessions directly with the Chief Sales Officer and his leadership team to work through the findings and agree the interventions.
The programme was paused, re-scoped to a focused MVP, and restarted three months later with new delivery partners and clear regulatory ownership.
A cross-cutting infrastructure and security programme running well beyond its intended timeline. Vendors were engaged on time-and-materials and working to outputs rather than outcomes. Delivery repeatedly stalled waiting on other teams, with no integrated plan, no capacity planning and no dependency management holding it together.
The EVP wanted an objective view of the year's delivery before committing the following year's investment — and wanted the assurance report itself used as the mechanism to set the next year's programmes up properly.
A targeted delivery survey plus a small number of short interviews for context, translated into high-level recommendations on what was working, what wasn't, and what specifically had to change.
A new agile delivery model and framework — teams restructured into chapters, with scaled planning and governance replacing the previous portfolio structure.
A VP of Portfolio Management with five priority programmes, all consistently reporting green — until issues surfaced as last-minute escalations. Confidence in deliverability had quietly eroded, and the reporting wasn't giving anyone early enough signal to act.
The company was preparing for a potential sale and needed an independent view to challenge the reported position before a buyer did.
A Portfolio screen at Lite depth across all five programmes, evidencing where the gaps sat and surfacing the risks the RAG status wasn't carrying.
Recommended changes to governance, reporting and KPIs that gave leadership earlier signal and meaningful oversight ahead of the transaction.
A large IT transformation, in which a series of programmes accounted for around 60% of the IT portfolio. One was running off course while reporting green at board level, with the real position sitting in project plans and in the terminology used to describe them rather than in the reporting itself.
Leadership needed clarity on how those programmes were genuinely performing against time and business benefit, and a structure for monitoring them on an ongoing basis rather than one review and out.
An objective, unemotional assessment across the portfolio, and a methodology the organisation could keep using afterwards. It surfaced what the RAG status was not carrying, and included an evaluation of the business case behind the programme running off course.
“The programme was temporarily paused whilst the Programme Management, Business Case and Budget were reassessed … bringing the delivery back on track with a more realistic scope and milestones.”Renato Callisto, VP Portfolio, Budgeting & Governance
No obligation, no sales pitch — just a conversation about whether it's the right moment to bring in an independent view.