Critical National Infrastructure organisations rarely have the luxury of “starting fresh”. The services they run are essential, highly visible and tightly constrained by safety, regulation, legacy technology and complex supply chains. In this case, a national public infrastructure provider wanted to take the next step in its business transformation programme and improve delivery maturity against its P3M3 goals. The intent was clear: raise the quality and predictability of programme delivery, improve cost and requirements management, strengthen customer management, and bring more consistency across a diverse supplier base.
The organisation was already investing in change, but progress was being slowed by familiar challenges. Delivery responsibilities were spread across multiple suppliers and internal teams, requirements were not always captured or governed in a way that made trade-offs explicit, and the customer experience was being shaped as much by operational constraints as by digital ambition. The result was a growing gap between what the business wanted to achieve and what delivery and operations could reliably execute—particularly at pace.
Our role was to work alongside business stakeholders and subject matter experts to bring structure and momentum to the transformation. We focused on three practical outcomes that would show measurable improvement, while also laying foundations for sustained delivery maturity:
- An end-to-end digital customer journey that reduced avoidable contact and supported self-service, improving experience while easing pressure on service teams.
- IT infrastructure modernisation to reduce legacy and technical debt, improve resilience, and create more agility in delivery.
- Faster delivery of an improved technology footprint to support new and evolving customer journeys, increase productivity and reduce cost over time.
Rather than treat these as separate initiatives, we helped shape them into a coherent delivery approach—one that linked customer outcomes to the capabilities, services and supplier commitments needed to deliver them. That alignment mattered. It ensured the digital work was not simply “front-end change”, but connected to the underlying platforms, processes and service operations required to make the improvements sustainable.
A significant part of the programme involved enabling the organisation’s Technical Services function to plan and mobilise more effectively. We supported planning activities, worked with leads to clarify scope and priorities, and helped create clearer “lines of sight” from strategic intent through to deliverable work packages. Where supplier dependencies existed, we helped make them visible early so they could be managed as real constraints rather than discovered as late-stage blockers.
We also provided market and sector insight to support vendor management decisions—particularly around what “good” looks like in modern service delivery, typical supplier behaviours, and how to structure procurement to encourage outcome-focused responses. Throughout, the emphasis was on ensuring that new services and suppliers aligned to corporate objectives and the Target Operating Model, rather than creating another layer of bespoke delivery that would be difficult to integrate and govern.
Governance and assurance were treated as enablers, not overhead. We helped strengthen the business case, clarify decision points, and shape governance mechanisms that allowed stakeholders to make informed trade-offs. Where relevant, we supported alignment with established public sector delivery expectations and guidance (including GDS-aligned thinking and CCS-style procurement principles), ensuring the programme could demonstrate due diligence and maintain delivery credibility in a regulated environment.
Day-to-day support focused on making delivery execution more controllable and less dependent on individual heroics. That included helping the programme team define procurement and sourcing artefacts that were clear, defensible and measurable:
- We supported the creation of ITT documentation and associated procurement packs, ensuring requirements, constraints and evaluation expectations were explicit.
- We developed bid and clarification materials that reduced ambiguity and helped suppliers respond against the real need, not assumptions.
- We helped establish quantitative evaluation criteria to improve fairness, transparency and consistency when assessing supplier responses.
- We supported the evaluation process itself—managing submissions, ensuring assessment criteria were applied consistently, and helping stakeholders arrive at robust, auditable scoring outcomes.
Once suppliers were engaged, the work shifted into the harder, less visible part of transformation: keeping multiple parties moving in the same direction. We acted as a “critical friend” to the programme team—helping them manage large suppliers, negotiate delivery realities, maintain progress, and prevent drift against agreed outcomes. In practice, that often meant translating between business priorities, delivery constraints, contract structures and operational needs so that decisions could be made quickly and with confidence.
Across the programme, we served as a transformation point of contact for ICT-related procurement and vendor management activity, helping to reduce friction between commercial, technical and delivery teams. This ensured sourcing decisions remained aligned to the transformation intent, and that supplier performance could be managed against clear expectations rather than informal commitments.
The outcome was tangible. With eight new key services deployed, the organisation strengthened its core delivery capabilities and improved its ability to execute major infrastructure programmes with greater consistency and control. Importantly, the changes were not just “new services”, but a more repeatable way of shaping, sourcing and delivering—reducing delivery risk, improving governance, and creating a better foundation for the next phases of transformation.