Turnaround programme
An engineering firm managing utilisation instead of flow
Around ten million in revenue and effectively no operating profit. The diagnosis was not sales or cost — the company was optimising how busy people looked rather than how value moved.
- Each traced to a desired effect, not a wish list
- 18 interventionsEach traced to a desired effect, not a wish list
- Immediate, short-term and medium-term, sequenced by dependency
- 3 wavesImmediate, short-term and medium-term, sequenced by dependency
- A service that converts bench capacity into money lost
- Idle time pricedA service that converts bench capacity into money lost
The client
An independent embedded electronics design house — roughly a hundred engineers across several European engineering centres, two decades of history, around ten million dollars of revenue and an operating profit close to zero, heading into a summer everyone expected to bring redundancies.
The engagement
A crisis programme framed on Theory of Constraints: baseline, current reality tree, future reality tree, target state — delivered with a change-management compendium and two working tools.
The problem
Revenue was reasonable and operating profit was not. The organisation's instinct was cost reduction, which in an engineering firm means cutting the capacity you will need the moment demand returns — and the anxiety that produces destroys throughput faster than the savings help. The deeper issue was a paradigm: growth measured in headcount, utilisation and hours, in a market that pays for speed, product thinking and unit economics.
What I did
I worked the causal chain rather than the symptom list. The current-reality tree traced everything back through root causes to a small number of deep roots — an outdated growth paradigm and an anxious organisation braced for redundancies — because interventions aimed at symptoms in a system like this cancel each other out. The future-state tree then made every intervention earn its place by naming the intermediate and desired effect it produces, which is what stops a transformation from becoming a list of good ideas. Interventions were staged into three waves so the immediate ones could fund the credibility of the later ones. Change management was treated as part of the design rather than as communications: operating principles, a governance body, a four-week sprint cadence, champions per function with a real incentive, and an anxiety measure tracked alongside the financial ones. And two tools were built rather than specified — the method portal so the trees stayed live, and a service that converts bench capacity into a number, because a company that manages utilisation only stops when someone shows it what the idle hours cost.
What was built
A causal diagnosis linking three deep roots through root causes and undesirable effects to the single problem of zero operating profit; a future-state tree of eighteen interventions producing eleven desired effects; a portfolio staged into immediate, short-term and medium-term waves; a change-management compendium with operating principles, cadence and named champions per function; and two internal tools — a portal carrying the method and the trees, and a service quantifying the money lost to idle capacity.
On the table at the end
- Current reality tree: deep roots, root causes, undesirable effects
- Future reality tree: eighteen interventions mapped to eleven desired effects
- Intervention portfolio in three waves
- Change-management compendium with governance, cadence and champions
- Method portal and bench-cost service
- Training pack including a teaching case and facilitator guide
What it changed
Reframed a cost-cutting conversation as a flow problem, produced a traced chain from root causes to desired effects rather than a list of initiatives, and put a number on idle capacity so bench time stopped being an abstraction.
How it ran
- 01
Baseline before opinion
The financial and operational baseline established first, so the diagnosis argued with data rather than with seniority.
- 02
Build the causal tree
Undesirable effects traced through root causes to deep roots — including the two nobody names: an outdated growth paradigm and organisational fear.
- 03
Make interventions earn their place
Each of eighteen interventions mapped to the intermediate and desired effect it produces; anything that could not be traced was cut.
- 04
Stage in waves
Immediate, short-term and medium-term, so early wins fund the credibility the structural changes need.
- 05
Design the change, not just the plan
Operating principles, cadence, champions per function with incentives, and an anxiety measure tracked next to the financial ones.
Other work
All case studies →- Payments
A red project where the client had no single voice
A payments build was slipping on every axis at once. The root cause was not the team — it was that meetings with the client were being spent discovering the client's own requirements.
- Enterprise software
Data and people existed; the process and the cockpit did not
A delivery assurance function owned everything and controlled nothing. I diagnosed nineteen gaps, designed the target operating model, and put stop conditions in the roadmap so it could not become another initiative nobody uses.
- Software services
What the projects actually earned, once someone put cost next to revenue
Margin was assumed to be about half. Reading revenue, cost and hours together showed a spread from a third to three quarters — and one project that had quietly overrun its ceiling without a change request.
Something similar on your plate?
Thirty minutes, no deck. I will tell you whether it is worth doing at all.