Preventing €1 million in Recurring Delivery Failures

Problem Statement

A €3 million project ran 3+ months late due to scope creep, undefined design principles and no risk tracking, missing the initial deadline by over 90 days.

Repeated occurrences of these failures across subsequent projects would cost us over 7 figures in lost income.

Root causes:

• No design phase: The company signed the contract and launched straight into development. No designs, no onboarding period, no teambuilding.
• No change control: Changes and issues were untracked. A large amount of scope creep occurred over the project resulting in an estimated 10% additional cost.
• No project governance: Milestones and timelines overlapped. Requirements were not evaluated ahead of time.

I architectured the system to prevent these issues from happening again, saving over €1m for every 100 developers.

My Approach

• Root cause diagnosis: Sales and delivery operated in silos with no shared language, quality gates or design process creating blind spots in project governance.
• Architected a 5-stage governance framework: Created clear gateways and flow of work from initial sales engagement all the way to delivery and sign-off.
• Drove adoption: Over 10 working sessions with C-Suite, Delivery Directors and Engineering Managers

Impact

• Prevented €1 million in recurring revenue wasted over 100 engineers.
• Created shared language between sales and engineering, increasing accountability and reducing misalignment on subsequent projects.
• Reduced late stage scope changes by 50%.
• Framework now governs €15 million in annual project delivery.