The same order touched five times. The quote that lives in one inbox. The spreadsheet that reconciles two systems that don't talk. Everyone knows it's daft, and improvement keeps losing to the day job, quarter after quarter.
The offer, so you don't have to scroll: one owner, from map to new way of working.
Month-end. Again.
Every month the same Tuesday: four people, a locked room, two screens, and a reconciliation the business already did once in its systems. It's called “checking.” Everyone is careful. It is also, technically, a second job.
The ops review last year produced a 60-slide deck and a pilot. The pilot produced a retro and a second pilot. The second pilot is now the process, plus the old process, plus a spreadsheet that glues them together.
You watch the best hire you made last year copy-paste between two systems for forty minutes (accurately, cheerfully, for the ninth time this week) and do the multiplication in your head before you can stop yourself.
It never gets fixed in the gaps, because there are no gaps. Process work needs an owner, a deadline, and someone whose job it is to be unpopular about the parts people like.
Good operations aren't a deck. They're a project with a go-live date.
Mapping is the easy week. The money is in the decisions nobody wants to make: what gets deleted, who stops doing the workaround, which system holds the truth. A process is only improved when the old one is switched off.
Twenty years of projects, told honestly. The Receipt stories are mine and verifiable. The Pattern stories are composites: details changed, lessons intact.
The pattern: an ops review, a sixty-slide deck, a pilot, a retro, a second pilot. Two years later the original process is still there, plus the pilot, plus the spreadsheet that glues them together. Analysis is comfortable. Switching the old way off is the project.
For a full year at BT I ran at 100% of target with a 1-in-3 close ratio on daily meetings. Not heroics: a process. Same prep, same follow-up, same honest pipeline, every week. Operations is what performance looks like when nobody's watching. I've never seen it fail as a principle.
My favourite pattern: the team that threw a small party (one cake, five minutes) the day they deleted the legacy spreadsheet. Four hundred rows, nine years old, three owners, all retired. The new system had been live a month by then. That's what done feels like: a little ceremony and a deletion.
Twenty years running enterprise programmes at BT scale. £1.5m largest single deal; critical paths, steering groups and real dates, held for a full year at 100% of target.
I've run the whole launch myself (platform, emails, ads, checkout): 232 course sales in four months. I know what every week of that calendar feels like from the inside.
I've held the £2m programme budget on the other side of the table: writing the scopes, choosing the suppliers, cancelling the ones who drift. I know what "nearly there" means from both chairs.
Projects end in decisions: sign-off, buy-in, adoption. Twenty years of getting to yes without pressure means the decision actually gets made, in writing, and stays made.
"I run projects the way I wanted them run when I held the budget. That's not a slogan; it's a specification, learned from the most expensive seat in the room."
Everything that's left, in order, with an owner and a date on every line. One page: if it doesn't fit, the plan isn't finished. Everyone can see what "done" means, including you.
Every line has a name against it, mostly mine. Status is offered before it's asked for, so nobody spends their week chasing updates that never arrive.
Red, amber, green, without the politics. Bad news travels in 24 hours; good news waits for the weekly. A plan nobody trusts is worse than no plan at all.
Go-live is the midpoint, not the finish line. Handover pack, walkthrough, and a team that knows exactly what happens on day 31, because delivery that doesn't stick isn't delivery.
The numbers above, the launches behind them, and a public ledger of the whole journey: applications, rejections, results, lessons. The highlight reel is boring; the delivery is the evidence.
You bring the process that hurts; I'll map it, cost it, and own the rebuild through to the old way being switched off. If I can't help, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
A pitch. There's nothing to buy on the call except a decision, and you'll know inside ten minutes whether I'm the person to run this.
Start to finish: how the client was found, the need proved, the option proposed, the work delivered.
One map, one plan, one owner through to “old way switched off.” Improvement that survives the next busy month, because it launched like a project, not a workshop.
Book the 20-minute callYou'll know inside ten minutes. · Every number on this page is verifiable.