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.
Your implementation left something below the surface.
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.
What you were sold
Portfolio visibility and strategic alignment. A single pane of glass connecting investment decisions to delivery outcomes. Every dollar traceable from board commitment to team execution.
What you got
A platform that tracks work, not value. Feature velocity measured in story points, and a dashboard the CTO cannot take to the board because it speaks a language the board doesn’t understand.
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.
What the research says
Generative culture (DORA)
DORA’s research on enterprise technology organizations found that a high-trust, generative culture predicts software delivery performance as reliably as any tooling metric, psychological safety included.
Which means culture is a leading indicator. Most organizations still treat it as an afterthought.
5.3x (McKinsey)
McKinsey found that when senior leaders visibly role-model the change they’re asking for, transformations become 5.3 times more likely to succeed. Leadership behavior is a delivery variable, not a values statement.
Which means it’s coachable. And it’s the lever most organizations refuse to pull.
70% (Kotter / HBR)
Kotter’s foundational research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that 70% of large-scale change efforts fail. The cause is almost never strategy. It is the leadership and organizational conditions in which the strategy has to land.
Which means that 70% was a leadership failure, not a strategy failure.
What clients experienced
A global LMS leader
A portfolio of multiple products ran on a platform built around org charts, not how the business delivered value. Strategy was not connected to execution. Rebuilt the platform around how work actually flowed, then coached executives through teams into a common way of working.
As the organization gained visibility into its own agile behavior, leadership finally had the predictability to make real decisions.
A global food and beverage company
A global food and beverage company had mature teams still working in silos, waterfall dressed up as agile, with senior leaders measuring success by what their own team controlled rather than what the business delivered. Restructured the teams into true programs, then coached leadership at every level through the shift from owning a team to owning a shared outcome.
Stood up a portfolio platform for real quarter-over-quarter forecasting, and delivery predictability jumped, giving leadership reporting it could finally act on.
A global payments network
A global payments network was buried in disconnected systems, with a freshly designed strategy that couldn’t be implemented as built. Limited the integrations to what mattered, then modeled the strategy into how work would actually be measured.
Visibility into how two of the programs were running showed leadership something new: the program that leaned in outperformed the other immediately, giving leadership a real basis to coach each on its own gap.
I knew this before I ever read a McKinsey study.
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.
VERIFIED
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
You bring me in fractionally, senior, and never as a junior on a staffing plan. Depending on what you need, that runs from a fixed-price diagnostic to a standing advisory retainer, from overseeing an implementation to recovering a stalled one, to coaching the leader the strategy depends on. One adviser, scaled to the problem.
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. |