Programme assurance and a governance reset that turned a struggling ERP replacement into a successful on-time delivery for a NSW government agency.
The agency's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform was approaching end-of-life. Vendor support was scheduled to cease within eighteen months and the cost of extending support was non-trivial. A replacement programme had been initiated twelve months earlier under a different delivery partner. It was not going well. Scope had expanded without corresponding funding adjustments. The vendor relationship had deteriorated to the point where the procurement team was no longer certain whether a renegotiation was possible. The programme board had been meeting monthly for a year without resolving the underlying issues, and the responsible minister's office was asking questions that the agency secretary did not have good answers to.
When we were brought in, the situation was recoverable but tight. We were told plainly that the agency's leadership wanted an independent pair of eyes on the programme and was prepared to take difficult decisions if the evidence supported them.
We were engaged to provide ongoing independent programme assurance to the programme board, to lead a full scope and schedule reset, to oversee a renegotiation with the implementation vendor, and to design the governance arrangements that would carry the programme through go-live and into the first year of operation. We worked alongside the agency's internal programme management office rather than replacing it.
The first four weeks were spent establishing a baseline that everyone could agree on. We rebuilt the programme schedule from scratch, working with the vendor's delivery leads to identify the actual critical path rather than the schedule as it had been presented. We rebuilt the cost model against the same principle, separating sunk cost from forward cost. The result was uncomfortable for several stakeholders but it was the only foundation on which a recovery could be planned.
From there we ran a two-stage scope reset. We started by classifying every requirement as in-scope-essential, in-scope-desirable, or out-of-scope-defer. That classification was then stress-tested with the agency's business owners in facilitated sessions, with explicit recognition that some of the "essential" requirements were actually vendor commitments made during the original sale rather than real business needs.
We needed someone who would tell us things we did not want to hear and back it up with evidence. That is what we got, and it is the reason the programme ended successfully. — Agency Chief Executive
We led a three-month renegotiation with the implementation vendor that resulted in a re-scoped contract, revised commercials and a renewed governance cadence. The renegotiation was hard. The vendor initially proposed walking away. We prepared an analysis that demonstrated — calmly and with full costing — that walking away would have been more expensive than completing, even at the higher unit rate we ultimately agreed. That analysis bought us the negotiating position we needed.
We redesigned the programme governance from scratch. The new model had clearer decision rights, a smaller and more senior steering committee, a fortnightly cadence for operational decisions and a monthly escalation path. A new assurance plan mapped independent review checkpoints to the critical schedule milestones, with clear triggers for board-level intervention if any checkpoint was missed.
The replacement ERP went live on the date agreed in the renegotiated contract, on a budget that had been reset to a realistic number at the start of the recovery. The first month of operation was managed without a critical incident. The agency's annual report for the year noted the modernisation as a successful delivery against a backdrop of significant public-sector technology delivery challenges. We continue to provide quarterly assurance reviews through the first year of operation.
Public-sector technology programmes fail most often for reasons of governance and contract management, not technology. The hardest work in this engagement was convincing a large stakeholder group that the path to success required scaling back, not pushing forward. Independence matters precisely because it allows the difficult conversations to be had with someone who is not part of the organisation's internal politics.
If you have a major technology programme that is drifting off course and need an experienced independent voice on the board, we would be glad to talk about how we might help. Early engagement is usually more effective than late.