A Transformation Director, for the programme that has to land
Mobilisation, delivery governance and benefits realisation for a programme with a date on it, including the ones already running red. One operator accountable for the outcome, not for the reporting. Our delivery teams behind them.
A programme is not an operating model, and the two fail differently
An operating model problem shows up as everything taking too long and nobody being quite sure who decides. A programme problem shows up as a date, a number and a steering committee that has stopped asking difficult questions. The first needs a Fractional COO and has no end. The second needs someone who will own the date.
This role takes the programme rather than advising on it: the plan, the governance, the third parties, the dependencies nobody has mapped, and the benefits case that has to survive contact with what actually gets delivered. It answers for the outcome at board level and finishes.
Most of what arrives here is not a clean start. It is a programme two quarters in, with a business case nobody now believes and a status report that has been amber for long enough to mean nothing.
If more than two of these are true, the date has already moved once
The status has been amber for months
Amber is where a programme goes when red is politically expensive. Nothing has been escalated because nothing has formally failed, and the date is still in the deck.
The business case no longer matches the scope
What was approved and what is being built parted company somewhere around the third change request, and nobody has re-run the numbers since.
The dependencies live in people's heads
Two workstreams are each waiting for the other, and the only person who knew the sequencing has moved teams.
Your integrator is reporting on themselves
The partner delivering the work also owns the plan, the RAID log and the definition of done. Their status is the only status you have.
Nobody owns it above workstream level
Every workstream has a lead. The programme has a steering committee. Between those two there is no single person accountable for it landing.
Benefits are somebody else's problem
Delivery is measured in milestones shipped. What the business was supposed to get is measured by nobody, and will be quietly written off.
Four areas of ownership, not a status report
Mobilisation & the Plan
Scope, sequencing, dependencies and the critical path, built once, in the open, and owned. Including the unpopular version: what has to come out for the date to survive.
Delivery Governance
A steering committee that gets told the truth early enough to act on it, RAID that is worked rather than maintained, and a status that means the same thing in month six as it did in month one.
Benefits Realisation
The business case tracked against what is actually being delivered, with the gap surfaced while there is still time to close it, not reconciled after go-live when the answer cannot change anything.
Suppliers & Integrators
Holding the partners to what they contracted to deliver, and giving you a view of progress that does not come from the people being measured by it. Where that turns commercial, it meets the procurement practice.
Taking a red programme is a different job from starting a green one
Recovery starts with an unwelcome conversation: the date, the scope and the money cannot all three survive, and somebody has to say which one moves. Most programmes stay amber precisely because nobody will have that conversation, and every month it is deferred makes the eventual answer worse.
We will have it in the first fortnight, with the arithmetic behind it, and we will say it to the board rather than to the programme office. Occasionally the honest answer is that the programme should stop. Where that is true we will say that too.
Before you take this to the board
What would have to be true for the date to hold?
If nobody can answer in specifics, naming which dependency, whose decision and by when, the date is a hope with a deadline attached.
Who told you the status, and what are they measured on?
A partner reporting on their own delivery is not independent assurance. It may still be accurate. You have no way to know.
If the benefits case were re-run today, would it still be approved?
Scope has moved, costs have moved and the market has moved. Very few programmes re-test the decision that started them.
Who is accountable for the whole thing landing?
Not each workstream. Not the steering committee. One name, whose job it is if the programme does not deliver.
Where this sits
The practice behind this role
Operating model, decision rights and the structure a programme has to land into if the change is going to stick.
See Business & Operating ModelThe standing seat, not the programme
Where the problem is how the business coordinates itself rather than a programme with a date, it is a different role.
See the Fractional COOThe delivery function underneath
Where somebody already answers for the programme and what is missing is the machinery beneath them: mobilisation, the PMO, the plan and the suppliers.
See Programme DeliveryWhat this has delivered
Programmes rebooted rather than re-planned, deployment cycles cut from months to weeks, and cost taken out of work already committed.
See the track recordTake an assessment
Six scored assessments, seven areas each, a rating on screen, and a PDF if you want it.
See the assessmentsBring us the one that has already moved once
A date that has slipped, a business case nobody now believes, an integrator marking their own homework, or a programme that needs someone to own it end to end. A direct conversation about where it actually is.