An operation is broken, stalled, or outgrowing the way it runs. The work is to find the real cause, fix it, and leave it able to run without me. Over 25 years, I have done that in four roles: founder, department head, business-unit director, and outside consultant. This site records those engagements, one problem at a time, with the diagnosis, the call I made, and what held up.
Last publications
Automating the assembly of a newsletter, and later the decision behind it
Two engagements sixteen years apart, a newsletter and a content-decision layer, share one rule: automate the low-leverage manual work when it costs more than the tool, and keep the editorial call with a person, since capacity and objectives stay human judgment.
Definitions
Rescue & Turnaround
I taught myself Scrum in a week and left it running as the team’s method
When capacity on a shared development pole went to whoever lobbied hardest, one unit starved. The piece follows a self-taught Scrum install, adapted in a week to a three-unit micro-team, that outlived the rescue and stayed the organization's default method.
Governance under constraint
Governance is a capability you build and amortize, not a bill you keep paying
For readers who carry a governance budget and fear it will only ever be overhead: the case that compliance work is a capability to build and amortize, carried by a single-product consent rebuild that passed a real control and a group-wide GDPR rollout met on time.
