Consider a multi-agency national programme — digital services, infrastructure, regulatory reform — that has slipped well past its original delivery window. The sponsoring ministry has lost confidence in the existing PMO. Replacing the PMO outright is politically expensive. Use this playbook to frame the work, sequence the analysis, and avoid the common traps in a brief like that.
The consulting question
Slipping national programmes usually share a pattern. The original plan was optimistic, the dependencies between agencies were under-specified, and the PMO has been doing status reporting rather than active governance. Everyone knows the programme is behind; nobody is willing to be the one who says by how much. The first job is not to design a new plan but to surface an honest baseline.
How to approach it
Honest baseline first. Two weeks of detailed dependency mapping across all participating agencies. Do not start with a recovery plan; start with the picture of where the programme actually is. This is uncomfortable for the existing PMO and usually requires explicit cover from the sponsoring minister.
Rebuild the governance model. Most slipping programmes have a steering committee that meets monthly to review a status pack. Replace that with working governance: weekly delivery reviews of the critical-path agencies, monthly cross-agency dependency reviews, quarterly ministerial decision points. Different rhythms for different decisions.
Triage the workstreams. Of the dozens of workstreams in a national programme, only a handful are genuinely on the critical path. Those get senior PMO attention. The rest get standard governance. The most expensive mistake in programme rescue is treating everything as urgent.
Reset the timeline honestly, once. One transparent reset is recoverable. Three creeping resets destroy credibility. The reset includes a clear statement of what changed and why.
Suggested workplan
Weeks 1–4: Diagnostic. Honest baseline. Identify the critical path and the workstreams quietly off-plan.
Weeks 5–13 (90-day intervention): Governance reset. New cadence, new escalation paths, new decision rights. Timeline reset published with explicit reasoning.
Months 4–9: Active programme governance. Weekly critical-path reviews. Slippage caught in days, not quarters.
Month 9+: Transfer to a permanent in-house PMO with the governance model and decision rights documented. The consulting team leaves.
Questions to pressure-test
- Which workstreams are genuinely on the critical path versus loudly competing for attention?
- Where are the cross-agency dependencies, and who owns each one?
- What does the existing PMO actually do — governance, or status synthesis?
- Does the sponsoring minister have appetite for an honest baseline, including the political cost?
- Who is the in-house team that will run this after external support ends?
A strong answer includes
The programme is no longer slipping; some of the previous slippage is recovered through better critical-path management. Cross-agency dependencies are visible, owned, and updated weekly. The minister has live decision-grade information rather than monthly status theatre. Most importantly, the in-house PMO can run the new governance without external support.
Common traps
The honest baseline is the hardest part. Surfacing how far behind the programme really is takes political courage. Most recovery efforts stall here.
Status reporting is not governance. The old PMO produced reports; the new PMO makes decisions. The distinction matters more than any tool choice.
Cross-agency dependencies are where the slippage hides. Single-agency workstreams are usually fine. The slippage lives in the seams.
The in-house succession is part of the workplan. If external support exits before the in-house team can run the new governance, the programme reverts.
Use this playbook to structure a programme-recovery case: establish the honest baseline, separate status reporting from governance, reset decision rights, and plan the handover from day one.