Get in touch

There’s an old adage that programme slippage is a bit like carbon monoxide poisoning: It’s cumulative, often invisible and there are few warning signs prior to the unconscious drift into the fatal moment. In a programme, the analogy is all of those instances where the small deadlines were missed; a week here, a couple of days there.

Controversial statement: Programmes should be fun. If you’re on a programme, you get to play a front-line role in removing all of the frustrations of your working life; the clunky applications with their long wait times and counter-intuitive interfaces, the arcane processes layered with workaround band-aids, the non-sensical org structures that mean everything takes three times as long.

The Outset – the beginning of a new programme – may look superficially like a greenfield experience, but it rarely is. It typically follows rapidly on the heels of the previous programme, which often means that the organisation is freshly scarred by whatever transpired before – the overspend, the organisational burnout, and above all, the belief that “we’re just not very good at change.”

The onset is the point in a programme where initial symptoms of potential failure start to emerge. Anyone who has ever experienced this situation will tell you that it is almost impossible to identify the moment at which the situation crystallised, and that’s for two reasons: The first is that the symptoms are cumulative – no single symptom on its own equals ‘failure’, but the accumulation of symptoms could, combined, mean that the programme will not be able to deliver the outcome within the agreed timeframe and at the agreed cost.