Create Cadence

As a CEO/CTO/COO, starting a digital transformation is daunting.  Without a clear picture, how can you know how to move forward? You struggle to understand the landscape, what needs to change, what can stay, and what the impacts will be on your people and your business. This is why businesses get stuck, frustrated and ultimately left behind. Over many years of transformation, our team has developed key deliverables to give management teams clarity and confidence in making decisions. They are: 1. Functional Map of the Business A list of all your business functions laid out in a simple format and mapped against your systems and teams. 2. Simplified As-Is Architecture  A diagram showing your systems architecture in a way anyone in the business can understand, allowing you to see the systems that need to change in your transformation. 3. Conceptual Data Model A first draft of the data entities in your business and how they interrelate. 4. Project Plan and Risk Assessment A simple and realistic approach to move forward with key risks highlighted. We usually deliver these in a month for roughly the same cost as hiring a contract PM and BA for the same period. So, in one month's time you could be: 😕 Hiring contractors and trying to work out how they can help you. 😢 Still trying to figure out a confusing picture. OR 😃 Sitting with the clarity you need to start forging ahead with confidence. Reach out if you want to find out more.

Being a senior leader responsible for a digital transformation is hard. You will have many options, competing ideas on approach, complexity in the transition. A fear of getting it wrong. But the fact is that the place most tranformations go wrong is at the beginning. And once you're on the wrong path, it can be very difficult to pivot. I just wrapped up a 7-week engagement helping an organisation of 400 people structure a business case and options for an ERP replacement. I focused on: 🔎 Setting out a clear vision everyone could follow and agree on 🧱 Breaking down options and decisions into manageable chunks 🔢 Aligning governance 📈 Creating a simple plan to move forward It sounds easy but so many organisations make it hard. And consultancies often don't help either because they bring their own agendas. What I bring is 25 years of project delivery experience, expertise in simplifying complex messages and most importantly, genuine independence. If you're a CEO/CTO/COO of a business of 50-500 people and you have a programme that feels like it's going round in circles I can help you get clarity and move forward with confidence.

As a project leader, a great question you can ask yourself when starting a complex digital project is: Are we playing to win, or are we playing not to lose? I see many organisations playing not to lose, and I understand that. Losing in projects means people get fired, and businesses lose money and market position. But there’s a paradox here, which I surface with my clients. By playing not to lose, you make it more likely you WILL lose. Here’s why: ❌ By playing not to lose, you fail to inspire your teams.  ❌ By playing not to lose, you delay and fudge decisions. ❌ By playing not to lose, you choose safe and underperforming suppliers. ❌ By playing not to lose, you slowly break down the trust of your execs and investors. My advice to clients who want their projects delivered is to switch their mindset and play to win.  Playing to win isn’t about throwing caution to the wind but managing risks and accepting that failures are part of the journey to success. Have you seen this paradox in action? How do you set your projects on a track to win?

Projects don’t fail because of missing roles; they fail because of unresolved problems. Instead of asking, “Do we have enough PMs, BAs, Developers, Testers....?” ask: ✅ What are the biggest obstacles to success? ✅ What knowledge, skills, and mindsets do we need to solve them? ✅ Who can bring those to the table? When you build a team around problems to solve, not job titles, you get: 🚀 A group of people uniquely positioned to tackle the challenges at hand 📉 Less bureaucracy and role rigidity 🎯 A sharper focus on outcomes It’s time to rethink how we build project teams. Hire problem-solvers, not job descriptions. P.S. If you need help with this, here are two ways I can support you: 1. Fractional Project Leadership: I will help you pinpoint your project's real challenges and bring tried-and-tested approaches to resolve them. 2. The Right Team Working for You: A team of project delivery specialists from Create Cadence will bring deep expertise in delivery, change, and execution, focusing on solving your biggest project challenges rather than just ticking role-based hiring boxes.

Have you seen "the game of flinch" in transformation programmes? It's that scenario where all the workstream leads report green, waiting to see who goes red first. And once one workstream does, the others breathe a sigh of relief and quietly adjust their plans around the new dates. It's common, and it's this kind of behaviour that leads to real problems in big programmes. It happens with suppliers too. It happens because of fear, ego, and power struggles. To avoid it, open, honest reporting and an understanding that a programme is a team effort with common objectives are key. Daniel Gater and I discussed this and much more on the challenges of legacy tech modernisation in the most recent episode of the Stand Up. Links to the full episode are in the comments.

Two weeks. That’s how long it could take to build a strong foundation for your legacy tech modernisation programme. Many modernisation programmes struggle to get off the ground or spend time going in circles, making little progress. And it all comes down to understanding. In this month’s episode of the Stand Up, I speak with Daniel Gater, a technical consultant and transformation programme veteran, about how businesses can avoid these pitfalls and achieve a successful delivery. As Dan describes, the key is in using a tried and tested approach to map the business and its systems by understanding: What are all the things this business is doing?  What does that mean in terms of functions? How does that map to technical components? One of our clients named this approach “the Treasure Map” because of the value and clarity it delivered for them. I explore the approach and much more with Dan in a comprehensive discussion on technical transformation packed with insights. The link to the full episode is in the comments 👇 Reach out for a chat if you want to understand more about how to build a Treasure Map for your transformation programme.

An enlightened project sponsor once said to me after I'd given a lengthy explanation: "So what you're telling me is that we can either spend another month refining our estimates, but they'd still be guesswork, and we'd then be a month behind plan, or we can spend a month doing the work, gather some real data, and we'd have moved the plan on a month". "That's exactly it", was my response, and that's what we did. I'm all for careful planning, but businesses often spend too much time trying to perfect estimates that will always be imperfect. It can be far better to understand and accept the risk of moving forward and have regular checkpoints to assess whether your assumptions around estimates are proving true or false. That's how I encourage businesses to overcome the paralysis that can occur when starting a complex technical change programme. Have you come across the challenge of "estimation perfection"?

When presenting to a project board, facts, figures, and progress updates are crucial, but they’re not enough. The real power lies in storytelling. A well-crafted story transforms your board pack from a collection of data points into a coherent, persuasive narrative. It connects the dots, creates context, and, most importantly, drives your audience toward the decisions the business needs. Here’s why storytelling matters: 🎯 Clarity: A clear story cuts through complexity. It helps board members understand what is happening and why it matters. 📈 Engagement: Humans are wired for stories. Presenting data within a narrative framework captures attention and makes the message stick. 🤝 Alignment: A story brings everyone onto the same page. It aligns stakeholders around the project’s vision, progress, and the support needed to achieve the next milestone. When I step into an interim or fractional project leadership role, I pay close attention to getting the messaging right. Because getting the right decisions from the board often hinges on how well you tell the story. What’s your approach to project board packs? How do you craft a story to get the outcomes you need?

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." There are two big reasons why digital projects often struggle: 1. Over-simplifying complexity 2. Over-complicating the communication of complexity If you get the balance wrong one way, you will see unrealistic plans and a breakdown in trust. Go too far the other way, and you will see projects that never leave the starting gate. So, how do you find the balance? It's by simplifying the communication of complexity (which is quite different from simplifying the complexity). Sounds easy, but, like anything, it isn't when you don't know how. At Create Cadence, we've developed a process to help our clients simplify and understand the complexity in their business, enabling them to move forward in delivery with clarity and confidence. So, if you have a digital project you're struggling to start or has stalled in delivery, reach out for a chat with me, and I will walk you through our process. If you want to work with us, that's great. If now is not the right time, you will walk away from that discussion with a clearer idea of what you need to do.