A campaign sometimes feels like trying to hold a dozen moving parts in a high wind.
My job is to keep the plan intact as the ground changes.
How I work
Campaigns often struggle because the blueprint no longer aligns with the tasks. Scope changes by an inch on a Tuesday. A dependency stays invisible until Thursday. By Friday, the project is a different shape.
In a network (local markets, central hubs, specialist teams, partner agencies) ownership becomes diffuse. Everyone is responsible for the brand. No one is responsible for the specific hinge where two teams meet.
That hinge is where dates slip. And when the hinge breaks, margin evaporates or the client loses faith. Often both.
Where I start
I draw the line where ambiguity stops.
I start with the delivery shape. I name the workstreams and the people who own them. I find the critical path: the single line of events that can stop the clock.
I make the scope visible. What we are doing and what we aren’t. If a request changes the plan, we acknowledge the cost immediately.
I close the entry points. If a client can brief five different people, you get five different versions of the truth. I close the extra doors.
I keep risk actionable. It’s a list of things that haven’t happened yet. We name them, plan for them, move on.
A programme runs when ambiguity stays below a certain threshold. My job is to hold that line.
Evidence
Examples are anonymised to respect client confidentiality.
Team half the size it needed to be
For a multi-market rollout, the team couldn’t keep pace because the capacity just wasn’t there.
I rebuilt the resourcing plan and scaled the team to match the work. I put a programme cadence in place and took escalation. Once capacity matched demand, the programme worked.
Agencies working blind
For a large programme with multiple agencies, there was a complex communication problem. What one team knew, another often didn’t.
I put a simple sharing protocol in place: the minimum necessary specifics, visible to the right people. Factual and bounded.
The alternative was a quiet collapse.
Five ways to brief, five versions of truth
Leadership couldn’t see what the account was working on. Clients were briefing different people separately and getting different answers.
I made the work visible: one board showing live projects and owners. I established a single channel for client requests so the team could give one consistent response.
Within weeks, leadership had line of sight. The reporting went from a guessing game to a single dashboard. The confusion stopped.
97 SOWs, 2 weeks, small team
A large volume of Statements of Work were due under a tight deadline, handled by a small team.
We opened an always-on video call and worked together. We grouped requests by similarity and made judgement calls where we had to. We referenced past projects and pulled in support to validate numbers quickly.
We hit the date by using structure under pressure.
If the work feels urgent but nothing is moving, I close the extra doors and restore momentum