70% of projects fail to deliver — and the cost is more than financial. Few broken programmes crash in a spectacular fashion. Most just quietly stall. You’ve got a roadmap. You’ve got people. You’ve got the rituals. But… nothing’s really moving. Instead you have sceptical stakeholders, wincing delivery teams, endless meetings and no actual decisions. Everyone is busy, but no one is sure what they’re delivering or why. Sound familiar? You’ve stalled.

Rescue and Recovery

You don’t need another status report. You don’t necessarily need a reorganisation. You need a rescue and then build towards recovery.

My 3F framework, the Feel Focus Flow I’ve mentioned before, is both a diagnostic and the fix.

Feel — The People Know

Diagnostic: You can probably feel it. It does not ‘vibe’ (as my daughters would say). No one’s speaking up. Teams aren’t collaborating. People are just coping. Delivery leads avoid tough conversations. Users and product managers are “joining later”. Too many people are afraid of somebody else. Everyone blames the engineers for going too slow.

Fix: Create space for honesty. Reconnect the humans. Get the users and/or product managers back in the loop. And stop blaming the engineers.

Focus — The Strategy’s Gone Fuzzy

Diagnostic: You’ve got priorities (yay!) but they change weekly (ouch!). Or everybody has a number 1 priority, and they are different. Either way nobody’s clear on what matters. Or maybe the overall goals are themselves vague (“deliver value” or “survive the quarter”).

Fix: Stop. Reframe the mission, preferably as a Vision using the the “SUCCES” pattern. Make it sharp, measurable, and worth doing. And then stick to it.

Flow — It’s All Blockers

Diagnostic: Governance is theatre because nobody believes what is said. Approvals take weeks. Teams are waiting on each other. Progress only exists in slide decks.

Fix: Cut the noise. Streamline decisions. Do less; only work on things that contribute to the focus. “Stop starting. Start finishing.” Get momentum back.

Why bring in an outsider?

Companies bring me in because their own staff have become part of the problem and/or lack the skills to get them out of the hole. We outsiders have a number of advantages. We’re not tangled in the history. We get to ask the “dumb” questions no one else dares. And we can say, with authority, “This isn’t working, but here’s how it could.”

One quick story

My mate Kieran called me. He had just started a new job and inherited a failing project. In fact this was the seventh failed attempt by the company. Kieran thought I might be able to help. I wanted a clear vision and got it in my first meeting with the Chief Commercial Officer: “Make Booking Better Simpler and Easier”. Then I worked with both commercial and technology stakeholders to define the intended benefits. The primary commercial goal was revenue growth (3% uplift), while the tech side aimed to reduce the number of applications and servers, freeing up people and budget. I built up the development team, integrating the permanent staff with specialists from outside. During the process I focussed on earning the permanent team’s trust; I might have been the external expert but I also valued their know how and insight. I did, however, bring in a tech lead who was up to speed on modern software engineering. I needed the team to adopt new ways of working — ones that weren’t the norm in that organisation. I collaborated with the product owner and technical team to prioritise development work that would deliver revenue benefits from day one, with the Revenue Management team tracking outcomes. When it became clear we couldn’t deliver all the intended benefits within budget, I recommended focusing on revenue and postponing the tech benefits — a trade-off that meant some teams would remain on legacy systems for a while longer. This tradeoff was acceptable because the tech retrofit wasn’t directly contributing to the original vision; It was a nice-to-have, not a must-have — and that made it easy to drop. We cut through red tape and kept decisions fast and lean to keep momentum up. This is where I used a simple Status Report: Best, Worst, and Throughput. Nothing more. The revised system launched successfully, paid for itself in the first year, and hit the 3% revenue target by year two. With the commercial benefits proven, the team then moved on to retire the legacy systems.

The Bottom Line

Rescues don’t need drama. They need clarity, courage, and momentum.

If your programme’s stuck, don’t hope it’ll sort itself out. Fix the Feel. Refocus. Restart the Flow.

Or better yet — bring in someone who’s done this before and knows how to finish.

Photo by ChatGPT