How to engage me from outside
Bounded work for owners, boards and executive teams who need judgement rather than headcount.
The mandate boundary
Executive leadership
Held inside the organisation
What I carry
- The estate
- The budget
- The people
And what happens when a decision turns out to be wrong.
Advisory
From outside, with a scope and an end
What I carry
- The question
- The independent read
- The diagnosis
The consequence stays with the person who holds the mandate.
Advisory is deliberately narrow here. I am not offering a delivery capability under a different name, and I am not going to pretend that a short engagement can substitute for an operating executive. What advisory does well is answer questions that are expensive to get wrong and difficult to answer from inside.
Where an outside view genuinely helps
Before a major systems decision
The period before an ERP or enterprise platform is selected is where most of the value — and most of the risk — actually sits. Once a contract is signed the options narrow sharply. An independent read on requirements, sequencing and organisational readiness is worth more here than anywhere later.
When a transformation has stalled
Programmes rarely fail loudly. They slow, then quietly lower their ambition. Diagnosing that honestly usually requires someone with no stake in the original decision, and enough operating experience to tell the difference between a delivery problem and a governance problem.
Technology assessment for owners and boards
Owners are often asked to approve technology investment on the strength of vendor material and internal advocacy. A structured, independent assessment of the estate, the spend and the plan is a small cost against the size of those decisions.
Interim and fractional leadership
Where an organisation needs executive technology leadership before it can justify a permanent appointment, or during a transition.
How I work
Selectively, and with a defined scope and end point. I would rather decline an engagement than take one where the constraint is political and no technology answer will survive contact with it.
What I do not take from the client
An adviser who quietly absorbs these has become a shadow executive without the mandate, and the organisation is worse off for it — because the accountability has moved somewhere it cannot be exercised.
The decision. I will set out the options, the trade-offs, and what I would do. Choosing is not mine to do, and an adviser who is choosing has stopped advising.
The internal sponsorship. If nobody inside the organisation is willing to carry the argument once I have left the room, the engagement is producing a document rather than a change.
The operating responsibility. I do not run the estate on an advisory engagement. That is the other mandate, and it is on a different page for a reason.
When the engagement should end
When the question has been answered well enough to decide on. Advisory that renews itself indefinitely has usually stopped answering questions and started occupying a seat.
I would rather name that end point at the start and be wrong about the date than leave it open and let the engagement decide for itself.
When the work is a mandate rather than a question, it belongs under executive leadership instead.
If that fits what you are facing, the contact page is organised by intent — start with Advisory.