Brought in when programmes need stabilising.

A consultancy is the right answer when you need a report, a method, or a bench of people to do the work. An interim is the right answer when you need one accountable person inside the programme, from day one, who can make and own decisions alongside your team and your supplier. Call it interim, consultant, contractor - the label has never much mattered. What matters is the outcome, not what's on the business card.

The usual triggers are a missed milestone the board has noticed, a go-live date that everyone privately doubts, a supplier relationship that has gone quiet or hostile, or a programme that is technically live but not delivering what the business case promised. In each case the problem is rarely capability. It is ownership, and an interim brings that without the overhead of a team.

Not every problem needs six months. Sometimes a few days of independent challenge is enough to establish what is really happening and what needs to happen next. For the fuller case, read 8 Reasons to Use an Interim Manager.

Run the Programme Health Checker for an honest read on where your programme actually is.

RAG status is the traffic light every programme reports with. Green means on track, amber means at risk, red means in trouble. Most programmes I have walked into were green right up until they visibly were not, because nobody wanted to be the person who turned it amber.

Three quick tests. Count the decisions made at the last steering committee: if the answer is zero, the meeting was a performance, not governance. Look at how long the top three risks have been on the register with the same owner and the same status: six months means nobody is managing them. Ask whether the data migration and the business readiness are green on the same evidence as the system build, because they almost never are.

I also use a fourth colour. Black means stopped. Progress is zero, not because the team is failing, but because something outside the team is blocking it: a decision nobody has made, a dependency another system has not delivered, a sign-off that has not come. Red is a delivery problem. Black is a governance problem, and it needs a different conversation.

The Programme Health Checker scores your programme across six areas and tells you where the green is earned.

Recovery starts with finding out what is true rather than what is reported. Month one is spent sorting out the mess: the plan, the RAID log, the supplier, the sponsor and the people doing the work, establishing what has actually been delivered, what the real dependencies are, and which decisions have been waiting and for how long.

Month two is spent building reality: an honest re-baseline, a plan the board can trust, a governance structure that makes decisions, named owners for the things that were falling between the internal team and the supplier, and a clear statement of what the programme will and will not now deliver.

How long the rest takes depends on how far the programme drifted before the call came, and on whether the data or the supplier contract needs unpicking. But within two months the board should have a plan it can believe. The most expensive recoveries are the ones where the call came a year late.

Start with the Programme Health Checker: it is the same first-week assessment, in fifteen questions.

Four things, and none of them are in the proposal. Whether your data is actually ready to move, as opposed to being in a system that has worked for years. Whether the business has the capacity to change while still running the day job. Whether anyone has written down what the benefit is and who owns delivering it. And whether the requirements are things the business needs, or a description of how the old system worked.

The contract itself deserves the same scrutiny. Licence timing, because you do not need a seat for every user on day one. Hypercare, because it is the first thing compressed when the schedule slips. Change control, because the hundred small changes that turn the new system into the old one all arrive through it.

Do this before you sign. It is the last point at which you have any leverage.

The ERP and CRM Readiness Check covers people, process, technology, data and commercial in seventeen questions, and the Payback Checker gives you the outline business case numbers to go with it.

The system being ready and the business being ready are not the same thing, and most go-live decisions only test the first. The system has passed UAT, the final round of testing where real users try to break it. The cutover plan exists. The date is the date. Then Monday happens.

Business readiness is a different set of questions. Have the users touched the system since training, or was training six weeks ago? Is the data they will see on day one the data they recognise? Does the hypercare plan, the support period straight after go-live, contain named people with confirmed availability and defined exit criteria, or is it three slides at the back of a deck? Who takes the first call at 8:14 on Monday morning?

The finish line is not go-live. It is the business performing better than it did before the programme started. If nobody can say what that looks like, you are ready for the go-live party and nothing else.

The Programme and Business Readiness Assessment tests the foundations in thirteen questions. Print it and take it to the go-live decision.

Outside IR35 means the engagement is a genuine business-to-business contract rather than employment for tax purposes. Status is determined per engagement, on both the contract terms and the actual working practices. For the client it means working with an independent professional who runs their own limited company, carries their own professional indemnity, and is engaged for a defined outcome rather than a role.

In practice the differences are useful ones. A deliverable-based statement of work rather than a job description. The right to substitute. No line management. The freedom to challenge the plan, the supplier and the sponsor, because the interim is accountable for the outcome, not for keeping a seat warm.

I work through Graham D. Rae Associates Limited, directly with clients, alongside consultancy partners, or through interim providers, whichever route suits the brief. The operating model is flexible. The approach is not.

If you have a brief, get in touch and I will tell you honestly whether it is one I can help with.