Services
Four situations I’m built for.
The problems that land here look different on the surface. Some involve a technology project that has gone wrong. Some involve a company that hasn’t moved while competitors have. Some involve a team that isn’t delivering. Some involve a business that has outgrown what it has.
What they have in common: the problem doesn’t sit inside one department, the internal team can’t solve it without external authority, and by the time someone calls, the cost of doing nothing has already exceeded the cost of fixing it.
The four situations
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01
A technology project that has gone wrong.It usually shows up as a confidence problem first. The vendor is still reporting green. The sponsor has stopped asking hard questions. The budget is committed and the sunk-cost logic is doing its work. What’s needed is someone external with no stake in the existing decisions — who can read the actual situation and say what’s there.
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02
A company that hasn’t moved while competitors have.The pressure to move on AI and digital transformation is real. Internally, the initiatives keep starting and stalling — not because the direction is unclear, but because no one wants to own it if it goes wrong. The decision keeps getting refined rather than made.
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03
A team that isn’t delivering.The CEO usually knows what needs to happen. The personnel decisions are obvious. What makes them hard is that everyone involved reports to you — making those calls internally costs relationships you still need. An external person with a mandate makes them without that cost.
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04
A business that has outgrown what it has.When growth has outpaced the organisation, the situation isn’t a failure — it’s a success that created its own problem. The business needs a function that doesn’t exist yet. Building it requires someone who has done it before, not someone who will design a plan for a team that isn’t there yet.
How the work runs
The engagement ends when the problem is solved, not when a report is delivered. For that to work, I need a real operational mandate — decisions on people, on vendors, on direction. That’s the condition.
Most technology projects don’t fail on the technology. The people decisions, the budget assumptions, the regulatory exposure — everyone had a hand in those. By the time it’s visibly failing, nobody remembers it.
When the situation needs a specific person or capability brought in — a trusted developer, a regulatory specialist, a financial modeller — I know who to call. No procurement process.
Depending on where the problem sits, I come in as interim CTO, CDO, or CIO. The role is defined by what you actually need.
Not the right fit for every situation
If what’s needed is a report that ratifies a decision already taken, I won’t take it on — the conclusion is written before the work starts. If no one attending has authority to act on what comes back, same answer.
What I need is a real problem, someone with the authority to move on it, and a counterpart who’d rather hear what’s actually true than what they were hoping to hear.
The first conversation costs nothing.
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