From Basra airfield to the boardroom.

I joined the Royal Air Force in 1980 and left twenty-seven years later as a Communications Electronics Officer. In between I ran the RAF’s satellite training school, advised commanders, taught leadership at Staff College, and delivered communications programmes in places where the infrastructure either did not exist yet or had recently stopped existing.

The posting that shaped how I work was Basra, in the spring of 2003. As Project Director for the regeneration of Basra International Airport I led a fifty-strong multinational team to plan and install the airport’s communications and networks from nothing. The airfield reached the highest standard achieved for a deployed airfield, and international civilian flights resumed. There was no budget line for delay, and no version of the plan in which it simply did not happen.

Other postings built the commercial habits. In the Falkland Islands I advised the CEO and executive board on every aspect of global military communications and IT, delivered a £10M infrastructure upgrade, and introduced practices that saved £900,000 a year. At Brize Norton I led 145 staff across five locations and developed a fleet of rapidly deployable communications vehicles with EADS, taking £500,000 out of the equipment programme. At the MoD I held governance for a £3M research programme with DSTL and QinetiQ, and delivered an £8M media centre to time and budget.

Two years at Staff College in Shrivenham — mentoring officers through leadership and management training, and rebuilding four of the training packages — taught me most of what I know about getting people to commit to a plan rather than merely agree to it.

I left the RAF in 2007 and spent the first years building something of my own — Talk on the Tube, a social network for London — and then ran Smart Ad Solutions, a digital marketing consultancy. Both taught me the commercial end of delivery: how clients actually buy, how quickly a plan meets a budget, and how differently a private-sector board reads a risk register.

In 2012 I went back to large-scale programme delivery, and have contracted through Quantum Consulting Europe ever since. The first engagement was also the largest: a £54M network optimisation programme for EE covering 27,500 sites, mandated to realise £15M a year in synergy savings after the merger. It delivered benefits 53% above target in the first year.

What followed set the pattern for the work I do now. Colt International needed a relocation out of a fifty-year-old site delivered in 120 days after the original project manager walked, against real internal resistance to moving at all. Arqiva needed a £5M programme restarted when it was on the verge of failure; it was handed over £100,000 under budget, and they brought me back for three more years. Ashfield needed a six-month telephony programme inside a regulated healthcare business, and got it in four.

In between there have been deployments that looked rather more like the RAF years than the boardroom — running the programme office for FCO-sponsored justice and security projects in Somaliland, and standing up the in-country PMO for a Home Office-backed policing mission in the Middle East, including getting fifty-five instructors home safely when Covid ended the mission overnight.

The first deliverable is an honest diagnosis: what is actually blocking delivery, and what has been assumed rather than agreed.

A re-baselined plan is only worth the confidence behind it. I build the plan and the sponsor’s ability to defend it at the same time.

I do not hand over a report and leave. The engagement runs until the thing is delivered, or until someone permanent is in place to finish it.