Project Management

The first four weeks determine whether a programme is governable. Most recovery engagements we are called into trace back to a mobilisation that skipped the unglamorous work: no named accountable owner, decision rights left implicit, a charter that states ambition but not scope boundaries, and a steering committee assembled for seniority rather than for the decisions it must actually make.

We stand up the programme structure deliberately — charter, scope statement and explicit exclusions, RACI across workstreams, tiered governance from working group to steering committee, escalation thresholds agreed in advance, and a decision log so nothing important is settled twice. Tooling follows governance rather than defining it: Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, MS Project, Asana, or Monday configured to the operating model, not the reverse.

A collection of workstream plans is not a programme plan. Without a single integrated master schedule, cross-workstream dependencies live in people's heads, float is invisible, and the true critical path is discovered only when something on it slips.

We build the plan bottom-up from a work breakdown structure, sequence it with explicit predecessor logic, and identify the critical path and near-critical chains. Estimates are ranged rather than single-point, with schedule and cost contingency held centrally and released against defined triggers instead of being padded invisibly into every task. Baselines are formally set, so variance means something.

Risk registers that are updated the night before a steering meeting are theatre. Effective risk management is continuous, quantified, and owned — each risk with a probability and impact assessment, a named owner, a mitigation with a date, and a trigger that converts it into an issue.

We run a live RAID log integrated with the plan, quantify aggregate exposure against the contingency held, and pay particular attention to inter-organisational dependencies — the vendor deliverable, the regulatory approval, the partner's system release — because these carry the longest lead times and the least direct control. Where uncertainty is material, we use scenario and Monte Carlo-style range analysis rather than a single confident date.

Status reported as red, amber, or green by the person accountable for the colour is a weak signal. Programmes need objective measures: schedule performance and cost performance indices, earned value against baseline, milestone hit rate, defect and rework trends, throughput and cycle time for agile workstreams, and burn against contingency.

We define the measurement model at mobilisation, automate collection where the toolchain allows, and report on a fixed cadence to each governance tier with the decision each forum owns stated explicitly. The purpose of reporting is not visibility — it is to force a decision at the point where a decision still changes the outcome.

Scope creep is rarely a single bad decision; it is forty small accommodations, each individually reasonable, none of which were priced. Equally damaging is a change process so heavy that teams route around it and the plan silently diverges from reality.

We operate a proportionate change control regime — thresholds for what a workstream lead can absorb, what the programme board must approve, and what triggers a re-baseline — with every change assessed for schedule, cost, benefit, and risk impact. Vendor and partner work is governed against the contract: deliverable acceptance criteria, milestone-linked payment, service credits, and a joint plan rather than two plans that meet at a status call.

Go-live is not delivery. A programme has delivered when the intended benefit is being realised in business-as-usual and the organisation no longer depends on the programme structure to sustain it. That requires change management running in parallel from the start: impact assessment, stakeholder mapping, communications, training, and readiness criteria that are assessed rather than asserted.

We close programmes formally — benefits tracked against the original case with an owner in the line organisation, hypercare defined and time-boxed, documentation and run-books transferred, contracts closed out, and a structured lessons-learned review that feeds the next programme rather than a shared drive nobody opens.