The situation I'm called into
The status has been green for two quarters and everyone has just discovered it was a polite fiction. Vendors are pointing at each other. The steering committee is asking questions nobody wants to answer. Every week the program costs more and delivers less. By the time I get the call, the cost of failure has stopped being abstract.
This is the work I'm built for. Two decades running concurrent operations — first as a U.S. Army Engineer Officer where the variance you tolerated was zero, then across government, financial services, and healthcare transformation at KPMG — taught me one discipline above all: find what's blocking the formation and clear it before it stops the advance.
How a rescue runs — the Sapper Method
Named for the Army discipline of clearing obstacles ahead of the main force. Three phases, built for programs already in flight.
- Day-one RAID rebuild: Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies — grounded in the system of record, not self-assessment.
- Stakeholder map and dependency audit that expose where the program is actually breaking.
- A written, honest read of the program's true state — inside two weeks, not at the next steering committee.
- Governance cadence reset and executive reporting that tells the truth weekly.
- Risk burn-down with named owners — accountability replaces ambiguity.
- Scope discipline. The program stops bleeding before anyone talks about acceleration.
- Release-train discipline and dependency choreography across vendor and internal teams.
- Accountability for outcomes, not activity.
- The program leaves the engagement on schedule, under its resource plan, with the next leader already trained on the runway.
Across financial services and state government, I've recovered programs serving millions of residents — including a $20M+ CMS-compliant Medicaid overhaul delivered with zero critical defects at go-live, and a zero-downtime enterprise migration across 8+ vendor teams that earned $10M+ in follow-on work.
Common questions
How fast can you diagnose a failing program?
Within fourteen days you have a written read of where it's actually breaking — rebuilt RAID log, stakeholder map, dependency audit. Not a wait for the next committee.
What does the engagement actually leave behind?
A stabilized governance cadence, weekly truth-telling reporting, a risk burn-down with named owners, and a successor trained to carry it. The goal is a program that finishes without me — not one that depends on me.