Terrain
The recurring situations that bring people here — and what we've learned about resolving them.
These six patterns account for most of the work that has crossed this desk over thirty years. They appear in different sectors, at different scales, under different governance structures — but the underlying situation is recognisable each time.
The portfolio nobody governs
Multiple contractors, multiple workstreams, and the sum is not being managed.
Multiple contractors, multiple workstreams, and the sum is not being managed. Someone needs to hold the governance layer that sees across all of them — budgets, dependencies, risks, and the reporting line up to whoever is accountable.
The Standish CHAOS data has been saying this for decades: the dominant failure mode isn't bad project management — it's the absence of the governing layer above the projects.
In practice: portfolios from $2M to $130M across social housing, property acquisition, and public sector programmes. Building the governing layer — reporting structures, contractor performance frameworks, financial consolidation, programme-level risk management — while delivery continues.
The capability that does not exist yet
A team, a methodology, and an operating model — designed and built from nothing.
Not a person to fill a role — a team, a methodology, and an operating model that needs to be designed and built from nothing. Recruiting, structuring, deploying, and then stepping back once it runs.
Building the capability while delivering the programme is harder than doing either alone — but it's how most organisations actually encounter the problem. The infrastructure must be built under load.
In practice: a 48-person national compliance programme, a PMO supporting 120 engineers and project professionals, a property acquisition framework for a $40M annual programme — all from scratch.
The client whose contractors are running the show
Someone on the client's side of the table who speaks the contractors' language.
The contractors have the technical knowledge and the delivery momentum. The client needs someone on their side of the table who speaks the contractors' language, understands the contracts, and ensures their interests are protected without slowing the work down.
This is the recurring pattern across most infrastructure and housing engagements. The client doesn't need another contractor — they need a practitioner who can read NZS3910, manage variations before they become claims, and translate between the boardroom and the site.
In practice: client-side governance across social housing, property development, and infrastructure programmes. Contract administration, development partner coordination, dispute resolution including legal instruction.
The transformation that stalls
An operating model that worked at one scale does not work at the next.
An operating model that worked at one scale does not work at the next. The processes are informal, the systems are outgrown, and the governance has not caught up.
Goldratt's insight applies directly: the constraint in a transformation programme is rarely where the programme plan says it is. Transformation stalls when governance becomes the work — when energy goes into reporting and stakeholder management rather than the operational changes that justify the investment.
In practice: solved in telecoms, transport, community housing, and public sector agencies. Identifying the actual constraint — not the governance structure around it — moved programmes from status reporting to measurable delivery.
Boardroom to site in the same week
Executive wants strategy. Programme board wants assurance. Site team wants decisions.
The executive wants strategy. The programme board wants assurance. The site team wants decisions. Someone needs to translate between all three without losing fidelity or patience.
The translation skill is not about simplifying the message for each audience. It's about understanding what each level needs to make their decisions and providing exactly that — no more, no less. Fidelity across the span is the discipline.
In practice: media boardrooms, Parliamentary appropriation committees, local government, and project sites — sometimes in the same week.
The technology changes but the problem doesn't
New systems, new platforms — but the real challenge is governance and adoption.
New systems, new platforms, new integrations — but the real challenge is governance, adoption, and making it work for the people who use it.
From building one of New Zealand's first e-commerce channels in 1998 through to designing methodology systems in 2026, the technology changes but the human problem stays the same. The governance challenge is not technical. It is organisational.
In practice: e-commerce channels, ERP implementations (PeopleSoft, SAP), CRM systems, geospatial intelligence platforms, and structured methodology design — each with different technology, each with the same governance requirement.
Intellectual Provenance
Formal qualification and trainer certification, obtained in 1996 during the national fibre roll-out at CLEAR Communications. The structured analytical methodology that underpins every programme governance approach since. Not just trained — certified to teach.
The project management method applied at Air New Zealand in 1998 to govern the e-commerce channel build. A structured PM discipline that predated the Agile Manifesto by three years. The project governance method that ran alongside the Rational development toolset — one governed how the project was run, the other governed how the software was built.
Full-stack deployment at Air New Zealand in 1998. Rose, RUP, RequisitePro, ClearCase, ClearQuest, Robot, Quantify, SoDA, TeamTest — nine of twelve components of the suite that defined structured object-oriented delivery before the Agile Manifesto existed. IBM acquired Rational in 2003 and left it to die on the vine. The practitioners who were there remember.
Direct experience across the methodology evolution. Hybrid PMBOK/PRINCE2 methodology designed and deployed at Gen-i across 120 project professionals. Not a certification holder — a methodology builder who worked across the transition.
Empirical data on programme success and failure factors across decades. The portfolio governance gap is visible in the data long before it becomes visible in the boardroom.
Critical Chain, Theory of Constraints. The insight that optimising individual projects locally degrades the portfolio globally. Constraint-based scheduling and buffer management applied directly to programme delivery.
Senior technical manager of the on-board shuttle group at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Trained in CMM by Keller directly in New Zealand in the 1990s. His group produced the most reliable software ever written at scale — the last three versions of the Shuttle's on-board software had one error each. Keller's contribution is front-loaded quality investment, specification discipline, adversarial review, and personal accountability for production. Before every Shuttle launch, Keller flew to Florida and signed a document certifying the software would not endanger the shuttle. That lineage informs everything in this practice about quality gates, evidence chains, and the refusal to spend money at the wrong end of the process.
Six-discipline framework for AI collaboration. The algorithm as a compounding asset — structured, longitudinal records compound in value over time.
The doorman fallacy, the efficiency-vs-value distinction, "sell how you think." The reason the Thinking section exists on this site.