How to recover a transformation that’s gone off track.
Let’s be honest about something the consulting industry prefers to gloss over: a great many large programmes get into serious trouble at some point. Not because the people are incompetent or the goal was wrong, but because complex, multi-year change is genuinely hard, and drift is easy. The useful question is not whether your programme might hit trouble. It’s what you do when the warning signs appear.
And there are warning signs. Delivery dates slip, but no one can explain precisely why. The relationship between the organisation and its main supplier or third party grows tense. Governance has quietly drifted, until the supplier is effectively steering the programme and the client is following. Spend keeps climbing while the value actually delivered stalls. Teams are working hard but pulling in different directions. And the status reports stay reassuringly green, even as the people on the ground know things are amber at best.
Notice that almost none of these are technology problems. Programmes rarely fail in a single dramatic moment. They drift - through unclear strategic direction, weak governance, over-reliance on an external party, and a gradual erosion of internal ownership. Recovery, therefore, is less about heroics and more about restoring the things that quietly went missing.
In our experience, the recovery playbook runs roughly like this. Start with a neutral, independent read. This is the single most valuable move, and the hardest to do from inside. Someone without an agenda - not invested in defending past decisions or protecting a contract - can assess the situation holistically and say the things that need saying. A fresh perspective is often what lets both sides see the problem clearly for the first time.
Re-establish governance and strategic direction, owned by senior leadership rather than the supplier. The client has to be back in the driving seat, with a clear, well-understood vision that everyone is accountable to.
Be honest about sunk cost versus current value. Money already spent is gone; the only question that matters is what the remaining investment will return. That reframing is uncomfortable, but it’s the one that unlocks good decisions - including, sometimes, the difficult decision to reset.
Re-engage the people and rebuild trust. A troubled programme bruises the relationships it depends on, and direct, honest engagement - internally and with delivery partners - is what makes recovery stick. Then re-baseline against what is genuinely achievable, not what everyone wishes were still true. A credible plan beats an optimistic one every time.
We’ve been brought into exactly these situations - including a stalled government digital programme of more than £20m that had drifted under a third party, with a deteriorating relationship and little internal direction. The value we added wasn’t dramatic. It was neutrality, restored governance, and an honest re-baseline that allowed the client to take back control and make the call only they could make.
A programme in trouble isn’t a failure.
Ignoring the warning signs is. The organisations that recover are the ones that act early, ask for an honest outside view, and aren’t too proud to reset. Trouble, caught in time, is simply information - and information you can act on.
