Core platform transformation
ERP and core systems at enterprise scale, through four decades of platform generations. The technical decisions and the delivery decisions are the same decisions, and we take both.
Practice
Programme recovery and reset
Programmes rarely fail quietly. They miss a baseline, replan, miss it again, and the reporting stops describing the work. We establish what is actually true and rebaseline to a position a board can approve.
When we are called
Usually at the second missed baseline. The first slip is absorbed and explained. The second is when a board stops accepting the explanation and starts asking whether the programme is telling it the truth.
Sometimes earlier, and better: a sponsor who suspects the reporting has drifted from the work and wants an independent read before the next gate.
What the work looks like
A recovery is not a re-plan. Re-planning a programme that has not been diagnosed produces the same date with more confidence attached to it.
- Establish ground truth across governance, technical architecture, delivery progress, data, testing, cutover readiness, the commercial position and the state of the people.
- Separate what is behind from what is broken. These need different remedies and conflating them is why second recoveries happen.
- Rebaseline scope, sequence, commercials and governance together, because moving one without the others is what produced the original slip.
- Take it to the board as a decision with its risks stated, not a plan with its risks appended.
Evidence
We conducted the strategic review of a core platform programme at an ISEQ-listed pharmaceutical distributor, surfacing the architectural, governance and delivery issues that led the client to mandate a full reset. We later returned to direct that programme, a €130m+ SAP S/4HANA and extended warehouse management transformation across more than thirty workstreams and three primary delivery vendors, through recovery and replan to a board-approved reset.
Diagnosing a programme and then being handed the job of repairing it is an uncommon test of a diagnosis, and a useful one.
Other practice areas
Programme governance and the transformation office
Reporting that tells a sponsor something they did not already know, financial control over a multi-vendor book, and a transformation office that prioritises rather than collates.
Assurance and regulatory readiness
Programmes running under supervision, the independent reviews they attract, and the audit responses that follow. Assurance built to be useful, not to be filed.
Integration and separation
Both directions of the same discipline. Bringing an acquired business onto one operating model, or standing one up as an independent entity able to trade on day one.