The organisation had grown into a multi-revenue business with a sizeable team, but the structure around it hadn’t kept pace.
There was no meaningful financial reporting, no budgeting or forward planning, and no clear way of understanding performance. Pricing had not adapted to external pressures, and roles across the organisation were misaligned with what was actually needed.
The organisation was operating without control. It was making consistent losses, carrying unmanaged risk, and had no clear basis for decision-making.
I was brought in to stabilise the situation and put the fundamentals in place.
The starting point was financial visibility. I rebuilt the finance function, introduced proper monthly reporting, and established budgeting and forecasting so there was a clear, shared view of performance for the first time.
From there, I addressed the commercial model. Pricing across core revenue areas was reset to reflect reality, and changes were made to the offer and environment to improve both quality and utilisation.
At the same time, I took control of the organisational structure. That meant addressing underperformance directly, reshaping roles, and reducing headcount while improving accountability and output.
Alongside these changes, I put in place a full set of governance and operating standards including policies, processes and reporting structures that allowed the organisation to function as a business rather than an informal operation.
Finally, I reset the leadership structure, introducing a more effective governance model and putting in place the right operational leadership to sustain delivery.
The organisation moved from being unclear and loss-making to structured, controlled and commercially viable.
It now has the visibility, discipline and leadership required to operate effectively and continue improving over time.
This was a large, international programme operating across multiple countries and politically sensitive environments.
The work itself was complex involving in-country networks, restricted information flows, and activity in regions where the operating environment could shift quickly. At the same time, the programme had scaled rapidly and newly imposed implementation timescales meant the internal structure was struggling to keep pace.
In practice, that meant risk existed everywhere but wasn’t being consistently identified, understood or managed. There was no single, coherent way of seeing the full picture.
I started by understanding how the programme actually operated which meant speaking to stakeholders across delivery, leadership and support functions to get a clear view of where risk was sitting and how it was or wasn’t being handled.
From there, I put in place a practical risk management system that worked across the whole programme, not just as a central function, but embedded into how teams operated day-to-day.
The aim wasn’t to create more process, it was to make risk visible, understood and collectively managed. What was put in place:
The result was a programme that moved from fragmented visibility to controlled oversight.
More importantly, the programme was able to operate with far greater clarity and control in an environment where that was essential.
In a large, complex system like Defence, policy is constantly changing – driven by legal requirements, cross-government priorities and operational realities.
At the time, those changes weren’t being implemented in a consistent or controlled way.
There were multiple policy updates in motion, including legal and cross-government requirements, but no clear structure for how they were prioritised, owned or delivered. Responsibility was spread across departments, progress was difficult to track, and delays were beginning to create real risk for contract delivery.
It was fragmented and difficult to manage at scale.
I was responsible for bringing structure to that process.
I started by mapping the landscape and understanding what needed to change, who was involved, and where accountability sat.
From there, I put in place a system to prioritise each policy area based on its real-world impact – legal, financial, reputational and operational.
Each policy change was then given clear ownership, with defined responsibilities and timelines, often cutting across multiple teams, departments and external stakeholders.
Alongside that, I established a governance structure that made progress visible, from working level through to senior leadership, so that issues could be identified early and acted on.
Importantly, this wasn’t just about clearing a backlog. I developed a repeatable process so that future policy changes could be managed consistently, rather than becoming fragmented again.
The result was a shift from reactive, dispersed activity to a controlled, prioritised system.
The system moved from something difficult to track and coordinate to something that could be actively managed, at scale and under pressure.
