01
You are thinking about a new planning system. The business case is being written, the vendors are circling, and you are less sure than you sound about how this lands in your organisation and what it will ask of the people who have to run it.
Starting in the right direction
A structured discovery before the RFP: the organisation read from its own artefacts, the situation, complication and implication written with the evidence attached, and a preconditions check in which the absence of any one can be fatal. Six to seven weeks. It ends in a verdict, and in a design for the first cycle rather than a five-year plan.
02
You have been running a programme for a year or more and it has stalled. Milestones slip, the vendor relationship has cooled, the steering committee is asking about the business case, and nobody in the room can say in one sentence what the problem is.
Programmes that have stalled
The same discovery, applied mid-programme, with more to work with: the change requests, the RAID log and the slipped milestones read as evidence rather than blame. Six weeks to a problem statement the organisation recognises and a decision on what to keep, cut and restart. Where the verdict calls for it, I stay to run the recovery.
03
You may be in any of the other four situations, and underneath each is the same question: have you framed the problem correctly? A new system, a stalled programme, a plan nobody acts on, a delivery that has outgrown goodwill: each is a change problem first, and the change deserves a strategy of its own, designed at the start rather than added at the end.
Change strategy, designed properly
A change strategy built by framing the problem correctly: the method from my book. Surface what no one says, let the planners who will live with the new way define what changes, and run the four platforms (Mobilise, Socialise, Systemise, Learn) as one self-sustaining system the organisation owns. With coaching for the sponsors and decision owners who make it live.
04
You have a plan, and it is just that. It is published every month, the meetings happen, and nobody acts on it. The vendor says training, the consultants say governance, and the planners have gone back to their spreadsheets.
The Decision Audit
A fixed-scope diagnostic of how your planning process decides: the register of the decisions each cycle exists to take, one owner on every line, the gap between plan and action logged with its causes, autonomy and cadence set for each decision, and a review where overrides are data, not sins. About thirty days for the first pass. You end with a baseline, a decision-rights design, and an answer to whether the problem is the engine, the data, the constraints or the organisation.
05
You have a programme that has outgrown goodwill. It is too big, too political or too far behind, the vendor and the business are talking past each other, and you need someone senior to take the wheel and answer for the outcome.
Programme and project delivery
Senior interim leadership that takes the wheel (planning, governance, stakeholders and vendors) and gets delivery moving again. The machine side runs under PMI’s CPMAI discipline in short cycles; the human side under the four platforms; one process, two vocabularies. Hands-on, in the room, and answerable for the outcome.
