Programmes rarely fail suddenly. They fail the way a rope frays: one strand of confidence at a time, until the board is holding a status report that says "amber" for the fourth month running and nobody can say, precisely, what "amber" means any more.
Five signs it's time to act
- Status reports have stopped changing even though the underlying facts clearly have
- Steering committee decisions get made and then quietly re-litigated a month later
- The delivery partner and the internal PMO each have a different version of what "done" means
- Testing keeps slipping and nobody can say why with precision
- Budget or timeline conversations happen without a credible, independent view of true delivery risk
What the first 90 days look like
Recovery starts with diagnosis, not a rescue plan nobody has verified. That means an independent read of programme health, vendor performance and real delivery risk - separate from what the status reports say - followed by a reset of governance and decision rights, and a credible, sequenced plan back to control. Not a re-plan drawn up in a workshop; a plan tested against the actual state of the code, the data and the test results.
Why independence is the whole point
This is precisely the pattern behind the largest recovery in Tequma's own record: an independent diagnosis of a critical technology transformation for a European energy provider recovered €35M of value and returned the programme to executive control - not by adding delivery headcount, but by giving the board a source of truth it could actually act on.
If your programme is producing more status reports than answers, our Programme Recovery service exists for exactly this moment - independent recovery leadership for SAP and Salesforce transformations in trouble.