Manufacturing · 6 months
Restored board confidence at a £40m manufacturer through governance discipline
Stood up a transformation governance pack that turned a stalled programme into measurable delivery.
Context
An owner-managed manufacturer had committed to a multi-workstream change programme without a governance backbone. Decisions were re-litigated; benefits were unclear.
Challenge
Eight workstreams, inconsistent reporting, no benefits register, and a board losing patience. Risk of cancellation within the quarter.
Approach
- ·Introduced a single governance pack: RAID, decisions, change control
- ·Re-baselined each workstream with explicit benefits and owners
- ·Established weekly steering and a one-page board view
- ·Coached workstream leads on cadence and escalation
Outcomes
+£2.4m
Annualised benefits tracked
8/8
Workstreams green by month 4
1 page
Board view replaces 40-slide deck
Handover
Programme director continued under the established cadence with quarterly review checkpoints.
A programme without a backbone
The business had been in the same family for three generations. Turnover had grown steadily to £40m, but margin had been eroding for four consecutive years. A new managing director, brought in from a larger competitor, had launched an eight-workstream transformation covering procurement, production planning, sales operations, finance, IT, customer service, quality and people.
The intent was right. The execution was not. Each workstream had a lead, but no two leads reported in the same format. Steering committee meetings were three-hour affairs where slides were re-explained, decisions were taken and then quietly unmade in the corridor afterwards. By month five, the board had started asking whether the programme should be cancelled and the cost taken as a one-off.
We were brought in not as transformation specialists but as governance specialists. The diagnosis was that the underlying work was largely sound — what was missing was the operating discipline to land it.
The single governance pack
In the first two weeks we replaced eight different reporting templates with one. The pack contained four sections: a one-page workstream status, a RAID log (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies), a decisions register with named decision-makers and dates, and a change-control log for any movement of scope, time or cost.
The workstream leads were initially sceptical. Several had spent significant time perfecting their own reporting formats. We held a single working session in which we asked each lead to populate the new template with their current week's status. By the end of the session, six of the eight had voluntarily abandoned their old templates because the new one made it impossible to hide ambiguity.
The decisions register was the most quietly powerful artefact. Once a decision was logged with a named owner and a date, it stopped being available for re-litigation in the corridor. If someone wanted to revisit it, they had to raise a formal change. That single piece of friction removed roughly half of the steering committee's previous time consumption.
Re-baselining the benefits
The original business case had committed to £3.6m of annualised benefit. Nobody on the steering committee could explain how that figure decomposed across the eight workstreams, and no workstream lead had a personal commitment to a portion of it.
We worked with each lead to produce a workstream-level benefits hypothesis, expressed as a measurable KPI baseline plus a target movement, plus a method for measuring it. Where a hypothesis could not survive ten minutes of challenge, it was either reshaped or removed. The total committed benefit landed at £2.8m — lower than the original number, but defensible line by line.
More importantly, each benefit had a named owner who agreed in writing to the baseline and the measurement method. This is the single most under-practised piece of transformation discipline we see. A benefit that nobody has signed for is not a benefit, it is an aspiration.
The one-page board view
The board had been receiving a forty-slide pack monthly. Most of it was historical narrative. Almost none of it answered the three questions a non-executive director actually asks: are we delivering, are we burning what we said we would burn, and what should I be worried about.
The replacement was a single A3 page. Top half: programme RAG, workstream RAGs, benefits delivered to date against forecast. Bottom half: top three risks, top three decisions needed from the board this month, and a forward look at the next quarter's milestones.
The first time the new page was tabled, the chair asked for the old pack to be appended for context. By the third month, he asked for it to be removed entirely because nobody was reading it. The board meeting time spent on the programme dropped from forty minutes to twelve, and the quality of board challenge went up rather than down.
Coaching the workstream leads
Governance artefacts only work if the people producing them understand the underlying discipline. We ran a forty-five-minute coaching session with each workstream lead in the first month, and a thirty-minute follow-up monthly thereafter.
The coaching focused on three habits: escalating early rather than waiting for a problem to be undeniable, distinguishing between an issue (a thing that has happened) and a risk (a thing that might), and writing decisions in a form that a successor would be able to act on without further context.
By month three, the workstream leads were running their own internal cadences in the same format. The governance pack had become the way the programme thought, not just the way it reported.
Outcomes and what carried forward
By month four, all eight workstreams were rated green and the cumulative benefits tracker showed £2.4m annualised, ahead of the re-baselined plan. The owner-shareholders confirmed continued investment for the following financial year.
The programme director who took over from us at month six inherited a cadence she could run without modification. Two years on, the same governance pack format is still in use across the business, including for capital projects unrelated to the original transformation.
The intervention was not glamorous. We did not change the strategy, we did not bring in new technology, and we did not restructure the team. We just installed the operating discipline that should have been there from day one.
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