By Ritvars Mētra, Founder of ReadinessCompassYou have inherited a programme that everyone describes as challenging. The status is amber and has been for four months, two workstream leads have left, and the go-live date has not moved.
The instinct is to rebuild the plan. Resist it for a month. A plan built on the same wrong assumptions will be a better-formatted version of the same problem, and you will have spent your only period of licensed ignorance producing it.
The first month buys something you will not get again
For roughly thirty days you can ask any question without it being political. You can say “I do not understand why this was decided” and receive an answer rather than a defence. That access closes quickly, and it is the most valuable asset you have.
Spend it on finding out what is true, which is not the same as reading what is reported. The National Audit Office found that programme reporting tends to emphasise what has been achieved rather than the risk that remains — observing of Crossrail that progress reports to the board did not adequately consider the level of risk to successful delivery still outstanding.
A workable sequence
| Week | What to do | What you are looking for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Talk to receiving managers, not the programme team | What they think is coming, and whether it matches the plan |
| 2 | Watch two people attempt a core task in the current build | Whether capability is anywhere near where reporting implies |
| 3 | List every decision open for more than 30 days | The binding constraint. It is usually here |
| 4 | Say one true thing, in writing, to the steering committee | Whether the organisation can hear bad news |
Week one is deliberately outside the programme. Programme teams describe programme problems; receiving managers describe business problems, and the gap between the two accounts is the most informative thing you will find.
Week two is non-negotiable. Half a day of watching people work will tell you more about readiness than any dashboard, and it gives you something no one can argue with later.
Find the binding constraint before fixing anything
Troubled programmes usually have many visible problems and one that actually determines the outcome. Fixing the visible ones feels productive and changes nothing.
The diagnostic question: if every affected person were fully willing and fully capable tomorrow, would this land? If yes, the constraint is capability and you know what to do. If no, it is somewhere else — capacity, an unresolved decision, a design that does not work, or a sponsor who will not spend capital — and no amount of change activity will reach it.
In my experience the answer is most often an open decision. Which is why the week three list matters: decisions open for thirty days or more are both the most common constraint and the easiest to make visible, because their age is a fact rather than an opinion.
The credibility test in week four
At some point in the first month you have to say something true and unwelcome, in writing, in front of people. Not a reorganisation of the risk register — one specific finding with evidence.
Do it early, for two reasons. It establishes what kind of reporting people will get from you, before the pressure to be reassuring has had time to build. And the response tells you what kind of programme you have joined: whether an uncomfortable, evidenced finding produces a decision or a request to reframe it.
That is worth knowing in month one rather than month six. Programmes rarely fail because nobody knew; they fail because the person who knew found it easier not to say so, and Mark Keil’s work on software project escalation describes why — continuation is never attributed to anyone, while raising a problem is.
What not to do
- Do not announce a new methodology. It signals that the problem was framework choice, which it almost never is, and it costs you the goodwill of everyone who has already been through two.
- Do not restructure the team in month one. You do not yet know who is carrying what, and the people who look least busy are sometimes holding the most.
- Do not promise recovery to a date before you have found the constraint. It is the fastest way to inherit ownership of someone else’s optimism.
- Do not rewrite the plan first. Rewrite it in week five, once you know what is true.
Thirty days of finding out feels slow to a steering committee expecting action. It is the only version of the job where what you do in month two has a reasonable chance of working.
More on diagnosing troubled programmes in the Adoption Risk Hub, or read the go-live recovery playbook if the programme is already past the date.