Programme Recovery

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 — or the full project triage and recovery guide for the end-to-end method.

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.

What you end up with

Concretely, not adjectives:

• A written diagnosis. What's actually wrong — not what everyone happened to be complaining about when I arrived.
• The immediate risks contained. The things that would have broken the programme in the next two weeks, dealt with before anything else.
• A replan built on the real problem. Not a new plan for the symptom.
• A handover you can run without me. The structure, reporting and decision-making the programme needs to stay stable once I leave.

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.

Where to start

The fastest way to get a first read is the free project triage tool — seven questions, about ten minutes, and you get back a one-page report: risk level, the real risks (not just the ones getting talked about), what good looks like, and three concrete next steps. Bring that into the first conversation and we start from a diagnosis, not a cold pitch.

I'm currently taking on contract and advisory work in the UK. If you'd rather talk first, reach me on LinkedIn or by email.