Turnarounds
Five lessons from recovering a $700M+ engagement
Most troubled IT engagements aren't lost on technology. They're lost on trust.
Over 23 years in IT service delivery, I've spent much of my career turning Red engagements Green, including an eight-year managed-services engagement worth more than $700M, where I was responsible for half of the delivery.
What actually moved the needle wasn't a new platform. It was five disciplines.
- Honest status comes first: Clients forgive problems; they don't forgive surprises. Recovery starts the week the status report stops being dressed up.
- Fix the top three pain points, not the top thirty: When a client's three biggest frustrations disappear, trust in everything else starts to return.
- Delivery leaders matter more than tools: The right tower lead, with the authority to act, changes outcomes faster than any platform.
- Look after the team: Exhausted engineers don't recover anything. Clear priorities, fair rotations and recognition come before new processes.
- Measure what the client feels: SLAs can be green while users are unhappy; experience data shows where the real problem is.
None of this depends on size. The same principles apply to a 30-person managed-service provider in Atlanta as to a global outsourcing account, and AI now makes several of them easier.