Project rescue · Program recovery
The status report says amber. Everyone knows it’s red.
Independent project recovery for programs that have stopped moving. An honest assessment first — then someone accountable for landing it.
Book a direction call30 minutes · No preparation · No deck · No fee
You already know. You’re looking for someone to say it out loud.
Programs rarely fail on a particular Tuesday. They fail slowly, in ways everyone can see and nobody will name, until the gap between the status report and the truth gets too wide to carry.
If several of these are familiar, the program is not at risk. It is already in trouble.
- The go-live date has moved twice and nobody will commit to a third
- Status has been amber for months. It has never been green and never been red.
- The vendor says they are blocked on you. Your team says they are blocked on the vendor.
- The people who designed it have left
- Steering meetings are about the report, not about the work
- No one in the room can say what “done” means any more
- The budget is largely spent and the scope is largely not
What happens in the first two weeks
No discovery phase. No workshop series. Two weeks to an honest answer.
Listen — separately
The vendor, the delivery team, the sponsor, the people doing the work. Individually, not in a room together.
Establish what is built
Not what is reported as built. Verified against working software, test evidence and environments.
Rebuild the critical path
What has to happen, in what order, and what it genuinely depends on.
Give a straight answer
Recoverable, recoverable with changes, or not worth continuing — in writing, in language you can take to a board.
The truth about a troubled program is almost always distributed across people who have never been given permission to say it at the same time.
Then someone owns the date
If the program is worth recovering, recovery is not advice. It is leadership, with a name against it.
- A recovery plan built on the real critical path, with the assumptions stated and the risks priced.
- A named lead accountable for the date — one person, not a resource pool and not a rotating bench.
- Vendor and partner management, including the contractual conversations most internal teams are not positioned to have.
- Governance that reports what is true, so the steering committee is deciding rather than being managed.
- A handover that leaves your team able to run it. The objective is to become unnecessary, not embedded.
Sometimes the answer is stop
Not every program should be recovered. Some have been overtaken by a decision made elsewhere in the business. Some were scoped against a problem that no longer exists. Some would cost more to finish than to rebuild.
The most expensive outcome is not a program that gets cancelled. It is a program that gets cancelled eighteen months later, after another two million and another two reputations.
We have no delivery team to keep utilised and no software to resell, so we have no reason to tell you to keep going. If stopping is the right call, we will say so — and we will help you write the case that makes it defensible.
Since 2000, inside programs that had to land
IT Directions has led technology programs inside large, regulated organisations — banking, insurance, telecommunications and property — where the delivery date was a commitment to a regulator, a board or a customer base, not an internal preference.
Contact centre platforms. Workplace and infrastructure migrations. Program recovery. Led personally by Simon Boutros, who will be the person in the room.
Questions we get asked
How quickly can you start?
Usually within a week. If the program is at a genuine decision point — a board paper, a contractual deadline — sooner.
Do you replace our project manager?
Rarely, and not by default. Most troubled programs have a competent project manager who has been given responsibility without authority. More often the fix is to change what they are able to escalate, not who they are.
What if the vendor is the problem?
Sometimes they are. More often the contract is — it was written for a different scope, and both sides are now behaving rationally inside a bad agreement. We will tell you which of those it is, and we are willing to be the person who has that conversation with them.
Do you take over the team?
No. We lead delivery; your team keeps doing the work. Bringing in a parallel team is how a troubled program becomes two troubled programs.
We have already tried to fix this internally. Why would this be different?
Usually because the people best placed to fix it are the people who own the original decision, and they cannot mark their own homework in front of a steering committee. Independence is most of the value.
What does it cost?
The assessment is a fixed fee agreed before it starts. Recovery leadership is scoped once we both know what we are dealing with. We will not quote a recovery before we understand what is broken.
Tell someone who has seen it before
Thirty minutes, no preparation, no deck. Describe what is happening and you will get a straight opinion on whether it is recoverable — including if that opinion is one you would rather not hear.
Book a direction call30 minutes · No preparation · No deck · No fee