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Fractional CTO · Programme Assurance and Recovery
Programme assurance and recovery for a stalled case-management replatform
A public sector body eighteen months into a replatform that was red on every report and green in every supplier meeting. Three months from red to green, then a clean handover.
The situation
A public sector body replacing a case-management platform used by several hundred staff and depended on by the public. Eighteen months in, the programme was red on every internal report and green in every supplier status meeting. The board had stopped believing anything it was told, and the internal team were exhausted and loyal to a plan that was failing.
The programme had been bought well and run badly. Scope had drifted as each department added its requirements. The supplier was reporting against a baseline nobody could find. Go-live had moved three times. Nobody had drawn the whole thing on one page since the business case.
What was in the way
The obstacles were less technical than everyone assumed. The data migration was hard but understood. What was missing was a single truth both sides would sign, a scope small enough to believe, and governance that made the board's numbers and the supplier's numbers the same numbers. There was also a public commitment to a date that the programme could not meet, and nobody wanted to be the one to say so.
If you cannot draw it, you do not understand it yet.
What we did
Week one was the honest baseline. Every workstream, every open item and every assumption drawn on one page and walked through with the supplier and the internal team together, in the same room, until both sides agreed it was true. That drawing became the programme's single source of truth and was updated weekly in front of everyone.
Weeks two to four were scope. The one release became three. The first was small enough to be believed and valuable enough to matter: one department, the core case workflow, live in the fourth month. Everything else was sequenced behind it with written reasons, and the board was told, with the drawing, that the public date would move once and why.
Weeks five to twelve were rhythm and governance. Reporting was rewritten so the board saw the same numbers the supplier saw, in the same format, every fortnight. The supplier contract was used, politely and in full, with consequences when milestones were missed. The internal programme lead was coached alongside the recovery so that the rhythm would survive the handover, and the exhausted team got a plan they could see the end of.
What changed
Red to green in three months on every measure the board had set. First release live in the fourth month, on the revised date, with the department that used it involved in the design. The remaining two releases delivered by the internal team on the agreed sequence. The public commitment was moved once, explained once, and met.
What they kept
The one-page drawing, still updated weekly. A programme lead who runs the rhythm without help. And a board that has a single version of the truth and knows what to do when it turns amber.
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