Service

Programme Recovery

I've spent fifteen years inside organisations like Asda, Morrisons, the Premier League and KPMG — usually brought in when something important is behind, broken, or both. Programme recovery is that work: taking over a programme that's already in trouble and getting it back under control.

What "in trouble" usually means

By the time a programme recovery engagement starts, the symptoms are already visible: a missed deadline, a budget that's crept past its business case, a delivery team and a business sponsor who've stopped agreeing on what "done" looks like. The symptom that gets you called in is rarely the actual problem — it's just the one that became impossible to ignore.

I've written about this distinction in more detail: recovery work starts with diagnosis, not a new plan. See what project triage actually is and why triage has to come before replanning, not after.

What the engagement looks like

Recovery work is diagnosis first, plan second. Concretely:

  • Diagnose before proposing anything. What's actually broken — capability, capacity, a communication gap, or a genuine disagreement about scope — determines the fix. Skipping this step produces a well-organised plan for the wrong problem.
  • Stabilise first. Before a new plan lands, the immediate risks — the ones that would blow up the programme in the next two weeks regardless of what the long-term fix is — get contained.
  • Replan only once the diagnosis holds up. A recovery plan built on the real problem, not the loudest one, is the difference between a programme that actually stabilises and one that has the same conversation again in six weeks.
  • Hand over cleanly. Recovery is a bounded engagement, not a permanent fixture — the goal is a programme that runs without me, with the right structure and reporting in place to stay that way.

Sectors

Retail, sports and entertainment, and professional services, across engagements with Asda, Morrisons, the Premier League, and KPMG. The common thread isn't the sector — it's programmes complex enough that the real problem is rarely the one everyone's talking about.

What this has looked like in practice

Outcomes from past programme and delivery work include enterprise digital transformation, complex integration delivery, and a dual-domain SSO integration — the kind of work that only counts as a success once it's actually running, not when the plan for it looked good.

Get in touch

I'm currently taking on contract and advisory work in the UK. The best starting point is LinkedIn, or if you want to get a read on where a struggling project actually stands before we talk, try the free project triage tool first.