After nearly 30 years of delivering and advising on complex programmes, I’ve noticed something that rarely makes it into the post-project review: most programmes that fail do so before a single workstream is opened.
Not because of poor execution. Not because of budget overruns or scope creep. But because the foundations were never properly laid.
Here’s what I see time and again.
The brief is ambiguous and nobody challenges it
Programmes get commissioned with a headline objective and a budget. What they rarely have is a clear, agreed definition of what success actually looks like. Ask five senior stakeholders what the programme is supposed to deliver and you’ll often get five different answers. Nobody challenges this at the outset because everyone assumes alignment exists. It doesn’t.
The fix is simple but uncomfortable: force the conversation early. Get the sponsor, the key stakeholders, and the delivery lead in a room and don’t leave until there is one written definition of success that everyone has signed.
Governance is an afterthought
Governance gets treated as bureaucracy, something to set up once delivery is underway. By then it’s too late. Without clear decision-making structures from day one, decisions get delayed, escalations get messy, and accountability becomes blurred. I’ve seen £20m programmes grind to a halt because nobody could agree on who had the authority to make a call.
Good governance isn’t complicated. It’s clarity about who decides what, how often they meet, and what information they need to do so.
The risks are known but not owned
Every programme has a RAID log. Most of them are populated in the first week and never meaningfully updated. Risks sit on a spreadsheet without owners, without mitigations, and without anyone losing sleep over them, until one materialises and suddenly everyone is surprised.
Risk management isn’t about logging risks. It’s about owning them. Every risk should have a named individual who is personally accountable for monitoring and mitigating it. If nobody owns it, it isn’t managed.
The sponsor is invisible
A strong programme sponsor is the single biggest predictor of programme success in my experience. And yet sponsorship is frequently treated as a ceremonial role, someone senior enough to sign things off but too busy to be actively involved.
When the sponsor is disengaged, the programme loses its political cover, stakeholder alignment drifts, and the delivery team spends more time managing uncertainty upwards than actually delivering.
Sponsors need to be present, informed, and willing to make difficult calls. If yours isn’t, that’s the first conversation to have.
The lesson
None of this is complicated. But it requires discipline and a willingness to slow down at the start in order to move faster later. The organisations that invest properly in setup, clear objectives, sound governance, owned risks, and an engaged sponsor, deliver better outcomes. Consistently.
If you’re about to commission a significant programme and want an independent view on whether the foundations are in place, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I have with clients. Feel free to get in touch.