Method
Measure, execute, make it stick. Three phases that almost no consultant covers all three.
Most consultants cover one phase. A controller measures but does not execute. A project manager executes but does not handle human resistance. A coach works on people but never touches the numbers.
You know the outcome: analyses that stay in a drawer, projects that overrun, systems bought and never used. Every handover between specialists is a point where value leaks.
I cover the whole chain, for a simple reason: the three phases only work together. Measuring without executing produces reports. Executing without adoption produces abandoned tools. Adoption without measurement produces enthusiasm that nobody can account for six months later.
1. Measure
Before changing anything you need to know where the company is losing margin, and how much time is left to fix it. That is not an accounting question: it is a question of survival and priority.
I use a structured method here, called TIMONE — Italian for helm. It applies the 80/20 rule: identify the 20% of data that yields 80% of real control. The objective is not accounting precision to the cent, which is what year-end statements are for. It is decision timeliness and cash protection.
In practice: a three-week discovery that does not disturb the organisation, a minimum viable data protocol, three market scenarios with pre-agreed triggers, and two cash sensors updated every Friday — months of survival if collections stopped tomorrow, and the ability to service bank debt.
2. Execute
Analysis becomes value only when something actually changes, within the time and cost planned. The difference between a project that lands and one that stalls is rarely technical skill: it is structure.
Work breakdown, schedule, responsibilities assigned to named people, progress measured by value earned rather than money spent — which is what separates a delay from a cost overrun. Methodology chosen to fit the project rather than by conviction: predictive where requirements are stable, adaptive where they are not, hybrid in most real cases.
3. Make it stick
This is the phase almost nobody covers, and it is where projects die. The main reason innovation fails is not the wrong technology: it is people not using it.
Nobody resists change out of stubbornness. They resist because change costs them something nobody has named: hard-won expertise made irrelevant, control shifting elsewhere, exposure to a new kind of error. The work consists of surfacing that cost and making it negotiable.
How we would work together
I do not sell days. I sell defined outcomes, with a scope and a deadline.
- Diagnosis — three weeks, low impact on your organisation. You end up with a picture of the numbers, a ranked list of where margin is leaking, and a measure of your cash runway. You can stop there: the picture is yours.
- Intervention — scope agreed after the diagnosis. One process, one line of business, one specific project.
- Fractional CTO — ongoing part-time presence, for companies that need technical leadership but not a full-time executive.