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The investment is real. The visibility stops at the waterline.
Most portfolios are delivering something. Far fewer are delivering what leadership actually paid for. McKinsey and Oxford studied more than 5,400 large IT projects and found they came in delivering 56 percent less value than promised. See the research. (Source: McKinsey & Oxford, 2012)
I’ve watched the same thing play out for thirty years, in meetings with the people running the company and on the delivery teams doing the work, across industry after industry. The money doesn’t disappear; it leaks: into work that never ties back to strategy, duplicated effort and skunkworks no one can see across the portfolio, and reporting that counts activity instead of outcomes. I find the leaks, design the fix, and direct seasoned people to seal them and verify the result, so your investment is visible and defensible at the executive table.
Twelve questions. Three minutes. See where your portfolio visibility breaks down, and which engagement might be the right starting point.
THE GAP NOBODY MEASURES
The platform is configured and the teams are trained. The data flows. But the investment question, the one the board actually asks, still doesn’t have an answer anyone trusts.
Most portfolios are delivering something. Far fewer are delivering what leadership actually paid for. McKinsey and Oxford studied more than 5,400 large IT projects and found they came in delivering 56 percent less value than promised. See the research. (Source: McKinsey & Oxford, 2012)
I’ve watched the same thing play out for thirty years, in meetings with the people running the company and on the delivery teams doing the work, across industry after industry. The money doesn’t disappear; it leaks: into work that never ties back to strategy, duplicated effort and skunkworks no one can see across the portfolio, and reporting that counts activity instead of outcomes. I find the leaks, design the fix, and direct seasoned people to seal them and verify the result, so your investment is visible and defensible at the executive table.
Trust and Verify, not trust but verify.
At the INF Treaty signing in December 1987, Ronald Reagan repeated the Russian proverb he’d been using on Mikhail Gorbachev for over a year: doveryai, no proveryai, trust but verify. The “but” did real work. You extended trust, and then you checked anyway, because the two lived in tension.
Most IT leadership today runs on command and control: constant justification, constant second-guessing of how the work gets done. It doesn’t work. Trust and verify is the alternative, and it isn’t naive about it. Leaders trust the team with how the work gets built; that’s what servant leadership actually means in practice. They verify that what gets built moves the outcome the business asked for. Those are two different questions about two different things, which is exactly why trusting one doesn’t cancel out verifying the other.
And the payoff compounds. A team that reliably delivers what it commits to isn’t just easier to manage. Predictable delivery is the kind of asset a CFO can plan capital against, the kind a bank will lend on. Command and control never gets you there. It buys compliance, not predictability.
I build the layer that makes Trust and Verify possible: trusting people to do the work, and verifying that the work moves the number that matters.
In 1995, “Trust and Verify” was the actual motto of the U.S. government’s Cold War-era On-Site Inspection Agency. The idea that trust and verification aren’t opposites has real precedent.
Patterns from 30 years of enterprise delivery.
The left column is what independent research says. The right column is what clients experienced.
I learned this firsthand watching three different commanding officers lead the same Navy ship. Same crew, same mission, three completely different outcomes. Read the full story.
In the years since, I saw that pattern repeat in every enterprise I worked in. Different industries, different technologies, different transformation programs, but the same dynamic underneath: command and control consuming the oxygen that execution needed to breathe. In 2009, I started formal coach training, because by then I was certain the missing piece wasn’t better tooling or methodology. It was leadership mindset. I’ve held both threads, the technical and the human, since then.
What I’ve found in thirty-plus years of enterprise transformation is that the visibility problem and the leadership problem are almost always the same problem wearing different clothes. The board can’t see the strategy executing. The leader can’t see why the organization won’t move. Both are solvable. And I’m one of the few people in a position to address both at once.
Veteran-owned, and a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business. The leadership thesis behind this practice was formed in the Navy. On federal work, I team and subcontract with primes who need senior depth, not just set-aside credit. Government Contracting
What working with me looks like
The proof isn't a logo. It's the people who worked with me.
Peter has an incredible depth and breadth of agility knowledge, and can explain obtuse concepts in many different ways.
Peter sees scaled agile not as a set of practices but as a mindset an organization needs to adopt.
Using the ELI metrics and the Demartini Method, Peter helped me transition from trading as a hobby to trading as a business.
Not sure which engagement fits?
Twelve questions. Three minutes. See where your portfolio visibility breaks down, and which engagement might be the right starting point.
Where your score routes you
| Foundational | The Diagnostic | You don’t yet know where the money’s leaking. |
| Developing | Implementation | Foundation’s there. It’s a build problem now, not an assessment problem. |
| Established | Advisory Retainer | Close to full maturity. Targeted advisory, not a new engagement. |
| Advanced | Executive Coaching | Tooling isn’t the constraint anymore. The organisation usually is. |