What to Do About Programme Underperformance: Two Modes of Engagement
How FMCR works with leadership teams to recover programmes in difficulty and prevent the conditions that create them
FMCR | PLAN OF ACTION
The preceding paper “Why Transformation Programmes Fail in Global Markets” is a diagnosis. This follow-up addresses what can be done.
The response to programme underperformance in Global Markets takes two distinct forms:
intervention in a programme that is already in difficulty,
and front-loaded engagement that prevents the structural gap from opening in the first place.
The distinction between them matters for how and when external support is most effectively deployed.
PART ONE
When a Programme is Already in Difficulty
By the time a programme in a Global Markets environment is formally acknowledged to be in difficulty, it has typically been in difficulty for several months. The governance mechanisms that were meant to surface risk have instead absorbed it. The question is no longer how to stay on track. It is how to recover credibly.
The diagnostic comes first
Recovery that begins without a rigorous assessment of where the programme actually is tends to repeat the same mistakes with additional urgency.
More resource directed at the wrong problem is not a solution. A credible diagnostic must answer five questions the existing governance reporting has failed to address:
whether the failure is technical or organisational,
what the genuine critical path actually is,
what work was always necessary but was never costed,
whether the vendor relationship is part of the problem,
and what the regulatory position looks like.
Until those questions have clear answers, recovery options cannot be evaluated with confidence.
Three recovery options
Once the diagnostic is complete, recovery falls into one of three categories, and the choice between them should be made explicitly rather than defaulted into.
1. Scope and governance reset. The most common recovery for a programme that has drifted from its original design intent.
This is not the same as descoping: it is a deliberate reassessment of what the programme must deliver to be commercially and operationally meaningful, followed by a restructuring of governance that establishes outcome-based accountability in place of milestone reporting, and installs ownership at the cross-functional level rather than the workstream level.
2. Focused scope with explicit trade-offs. Where the programme cannot be delivered within a timeline and budget that remain commercially rational, the disciplined response is deliberate scope reduction: trade-offs made explicit, deferrals documented, and the revised scope tested against the question of whether the remaining programme leaves the operating model in a materially better position than doing nothing.
3. Structured close. Not every programme in difficulty should be recovered.
Where the original business need has changed materially, or the cost of completion now exceeds the value of the expected outcome, closure is the right answer.
A programme closed on the basis of a clear-eyed assessment of revised economics releases capital and leadership capacity to higher-value priorities. The failure mode is not closure: it is continuing to fund a programme that will not deliver because no one is willing to make the decision.
What recovery intervention addresses
Recovery intervention works primarily against delivery costs. A rigorous diagnostic surfaces the hidden work accumulated since approval, maps the genuine critical path, and reassesses the vendor and regulatory position as live variables. The scope and governance reset stops the drain on subject-matter-expert time and removes the manual exception management that has built up to keep operations running.
On the outcome side, a properly embedded reset scope can still deliver the operating model improvements the business case envisaged. Programme credibility with the board, scope the front office will genuinely adopt, and leadership attention returned to the business are all within reach of a well-executed intervention.
What recovery cannot address is the delivery cost already incurred. The case for intervention is that it stops those costs compounding further.
The cost of the intervention is typically small relative to the cost of continued underperformance.
The role of operational authority
The recurring observation across programme recovery in Markets environments is that genuine operational authority makes more difference than any structural intervention: the capacity to engage simultaneously with the head of trading, the head of risk, the CTO and the CFO, to speak credibly about what the programme means for the operating model from the inside, and to make recommendations those stakeholders will act on rather than refer upward.
This is what FMCR deploys into programme recover -: senior practitioners who have held COO, business head and trading leadership roles in equivalent environments, who engage as peers with the stakeholders whose decisions determine whether a programme recovers, and who carry no stake in the choices that created the problem.
PART TWO
Why Front-Loading Is the Better Investment
The argument for bringing front-to-back operational authority into a programme at the outset is not primarily about cost, though the cost of early engagement is visible in a way that the cost of late correction is not.
It is about where capacity and domain knowledge are naturally available within an institution at the point a programme is being designed.
The capacity gap and why it persists
Technology teams and operations functions tend to find their resource bandwidth and domain knowledge when a programme is mobilised.
What is structurally harder to resource at pace is the commercial and front-office dimension: the capacity to translate a strategic ambition into an operating model the business will actually adopt, to interrogate the business case from the inside, and to hold the front-to-back view across trading, risk, finance and operations simultaneously.
That perspective is rarely available as surge capacity within the institution at the moment when it is most needed.
Part of the reason is structural. When institutions attempt to resource the front-office dimension internally, the individuals asked to carry that role face an inherent conflict. Performance is measured and careers are shaped by front-line contribution. A project role sits alongside those priorities rather than replacing them. The individual responds rationally by directing their best attention where it matters most to them. The programme receives a version of the business voice it needs, not the full weight of it.
A further dynamic compounds this. When a genuinely high-performing practitioner is identified as a project resource, the business faces an implicit choice: release someone whose contribution would be genuinely missed, or find an alternative. In practice, project roles frequently fall to experienced individuals whose front-line contribution has become more marginal. The programme receives nominal business sponsorship with the right institutional history but without the active engagement the role requires.
Sourcing this capacity externally resolves both sides of the conflict.
Practitioners deployed by FMCR carry no front-line performance obligation, no desk affiliation and no competing priorities. The front-line team keeps its best people where they create most value. Resourcing decisions on the desk can be made based on genuine front-line performance rather than availability for project work.
One distinction is important to preserve. Corporate memory, knowing which systems behave unexpectedly, which cross-border dependencies are undocumented, which relationships carry institutional weight, is genuinely valuable and synthesisable without risk to the programme.
Genuine front-to-back operational awareness is different: the integrative capacity to hold commercial, risk and operational dimensions simultaneously and carry the authority to act on that view across functional boundaries. It is not automatically acquired by twenty years in a front-line role, and it is the capability most consistently absent when programmes are staffed on the basis of institutional availability rather than genuine fit.
What front-loaded engagement changes
Front-loaded engagement with a practitioner who holds genuine front-to-back operational knowledge closes the structural gap before it becomes a delivery problem. It does this in three specific ways.
It grounds the scope in operational reality. The question a former COO or business head asks of a proposed programme is not whether the target state is directionally attractive but whether the path from current state to target state has been designed with a grounded view of process complexity, exception volumes, booking model variation, control obligations and the behavioural change required. That question, asked before approval, prevents the gap from opening.
It establishes the benefits framework before it becomes a political object. Once a programme is mobilised, the benefits case belongs to the programme and is rarely tested against operational reality. A practitioner engaged before approval constructs a framework built on the same operational knowledge that will be used to test it: one with metrics that can be observed rather than asserted.
It creates a credible front-office voice in governance from the outset. When the front office is not genuinely involved in shaping a programme, it faces a choice at delivery: accept an outcome it did not design or resist adoption. Front-office resistance at delivery is one of the most expensive failure modes in Markets transformation and is entirely preventable if the right voice is present at the design stage.
What this addresses and what it costs
On delivery costs: scope grounded in front-to-back operational reality before approval means the hidden work is not hidden;
Data remediation, interface complexity, control redesign and the realistic duration of parallel running are surfaced as first-order scope items.
The subject-matter-expert drain from repeated design loops is substantially reduced.
The dependency congestion that produces timeline overrun is mapped before it becomes the critical path.
On outcome costs: a benefits framework constructed before the programme becomes invested in its own continuity is one that can actually be tested. Front-office ownership of the scope from the design stage means the operating model delivered is one the business has shaped and will adopt.
The cost of a focused pre-approval or mobilisation engagement is a fraction of the cost of recovery. It requires no large team, no extended contractual commitment and no internal restructuring. The compounding benefit is not only the avoided cost of recovery but the full value of a programme that actually delivers what it set out to.
A programme that lands within its approved parameters and achieves genuine front-office adoption returns senior capacity to the business. That is what front-loading makes possible.
The underlying principle
Most transformation underperformance in Global Markets can be a symptom of poor institutional self-knowledge: the organisation approves a change it does not fully understand.
The response is not more governance, more resource or a better project management methodology.
It is improved operational judgment, deployed earlier. Senior capacity beneath ExCo has been thinned deliberately over the past decade. The practitioners who have run front-to-back Markets businesses, led COO functions through material transformation and carried the cross-functional authority that programme governance requires are not typically available inside institutions at the moment they are needed.
This is precisely the gap FMCR was established to fill.
About FMCR
FMCR is a network of senior practitioners, former COOs, global business heads, traders and risk leaders from Tier 1 global banks, providing advisory services to Markets and Banking leadership teams across risk management and performance. To discuss how FMCR can help your firm, contact Jason Richardson (jasonrichardson@fmcr.com) or Ian Gaskell (iangaskell@fmcr.com), or visit fmcr.com.