Recovering a Programme in Trouble: Stop Before You Re-Plan
When a programme is in trouble the instinct is to produce a new plan. It is almost always the wrong first move, because the new plan inherits the assumptions that caused the problem.
By the time somebody says out loud that a programme is in trouble, it has usually been in trouble for months.
That is the part people find hardest to accept afterwards. The problem was not a surprise. Plenty of people could see it — they just had no safe way to say so, or said so quietly to somebody who did not pass it on. The status report is almost always the last thing to find out.
I have been brought into a few of these, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth writing down.
The Re-Plan Reflex
The instinct, once trouble is admitted, is to produce a new plan.
It is an understandable instinct. A plan is a visible act of control, it can be shown to a board, and it makes everyone feel that something has been done. Within a fortnight there is usually a fresh schedule, a new set of milestones and a tighter governance cycle.
Then, four months later, the same conversation happens again.
The new plan fails because it inherits the assumptions that produced the old one. The same estimates, the same view of what is finished, the same appetite for saying yes. Re-planning first treats the symptom — the dates were wrong — and leaves the cause completely untouched.
Find Out What Is Actually True
The first job in a recovery is not planning. It is establishing what is real, which is duller and considerably more uncomfortable.
That means going and looking, rather than reading. In practice:
- What is genuinely finished, in the sense that somebody outside the team would agree it is finished?
- What has been reported complete but is waiting on something that has not happened?
- Which dependencies are assumed rather than agreed?
- What do the people doing the work think the real dates are?
That last question is the one that repays the effort. The people building the thing almost always know. Ask them individually, away from the forum where the answer has consequences. You will get a picture that differs sharply from the report — not because anyone lied, but because each optimistic rounding was reasonable on its own, and they compound.
Expect this to take a couple of weeks and to be unpopular. It is still faster than re-planning twice.
Recovery Is a Scope Decision
Once the position is honest, the choice becomes clearer, and it is usually not a delivery choice at all.
A programme in trouble is committed to more than it can deliver. You can add people, which is slow and often makes things worse. You can move the date, which is sometimes right and rarely enough on its own. Or you can do less.
The third is the one that works, and the one nobody wants to propose.
Doing less does not mean abandoning the outcome. It means going back to what the organisation actually wanted and asking which parts of the programme genuinely serve it. Then stopping the parts that do not — including the ones that are half-built and have people attached to them.
That is an executive decision, not a programme one. If the sponsor will not make it, the recovery has not really started.
Fix the Reporting Before the Schedule
There is a step people skip, and skipping it is why programmes need recovering twice.
If a team spent six months reporting green while knowing otherwise, the plan was not the only thing that broke. Something in the culture made honesty expensive — a sponsor who reacted badly to bad news, a governance forum that punished amber, a delivery partner whose contract rewarded optimism.
Unless that changes, the new plan will be reported green too, right up until it is not.
The fix is unglamorous. Make it safe to raise a problem early, and make it clear that the person who flags a slip in February has done their job well. That is a behaviour the sponsor sets, and it cannot be delegated to a PMO.
Then, Finally, Re-Plan
Only now is a plan worth building — one based on what is true, scoped to what matters, owned by people who believe it.
It will be less ambitious than the original. That is the point. A programme that lands something real is worth considerably more than one that keeps promising everything and delivering it late.
The organisations that recover well are not the ones with the best recovery methodology. They are the ones willing to hear the honest answer early, and to act on it while acting is still cheap.