CASE 00 · OPERATIONS
A real operational transformation
A Tier 1 global asset manager had contracted a transformation of its Client Service Reporting across eighteen regions. Four regions were open. All four had stalled. Productivity was running at ten percent of contractual SLA, and the client had given an ultimatum. I had been in the company for less than a month when my director told me to come back with a plan in three days.
- €1.5M
Annual contract preserved
under documented threat of cancellation
- 4,000
Reports delivered to specification
against an original target of 4,000
- 18
Regions stabilized from four stalled
in nine to ten weeks
- 9 months
From crisis to platform
now becoming the firm’s offering
The team had the people. What it lacked was someone pointing them in the right direction.
Within ten days I built a cross-cutting analysis nobody else had attempted: centralized data from dozens of disconnected sources into a single Power Pivot model, interviewed every analyst on the team, and reconstructed who was producing what.
The findings were structural. One analyst was generating roughly half of all completed reports. Eleven of sixteen analysts were delivering zero. The team had capacity. It did not have direction. The Lead BA had stopped managing under pressure and defaulted to blaming the parallel reporting team for every failure.
Three indicators told the story. Productivity at ten percent of the contractual baseline. Client engagement at six meetings across the entire team per week against a target of three to four per analyst. Data integrity below sixty percent in a system requiring full consistency to function.
My director gave me seventy-two hours. I came back with a plan that required dismantling his own reporting line.
The first intervention restructured the Business Analyst side. Six analysts selected for output and reliability, regardless of tenure. The underperforming Lead moved to individual contributor. The highest producer promoted to lead with one non-negotiable condition: he would manage, he would not produce. The moment he returned to analysis the bottleneck would reform.
Within three weeks output climbed from twenty to over three hundred reports per week. The project was no longer on the edge of cancellation. But the parallel reporting pipeline was carrying problems of a different kind.
Roughly 1,200 reports had been miscatalogued inside the production system. The Service Manager running that side could not see the discrepancy because he could not structure the underlying data. I built a second intervention called the Swing Model, introducing three operational tiers, dynamic resource allocation between analysis and production functions, and AI demand forecasting that had been quietly running in the background since June.
The 1,200 reports sitting in limbo were absorbed in a single month.
AI at its most powerful operates as an orchestration layer, amplifying the capacity of someone who understands the operational problem deeply enough to ask the right questions.
A contract under documented threat of cancellation was preserved, expanded, and rebuilt as a platform offering.
By April 2026 the numbers no longer needed embellishment. All eighteen regions operational. BA output peaking at 583 reports per week. Roughly 4,000 reports processed against an original target of 4,000. A contract worth over €1.5M annually preserved and expanded into a Phase 2 conversation around the firm’s proprietary reporting platform.
The deeper outcome was strategic. The engagement had been designed as a lift-and-shift: absorb the client’s reporting operations, run them at lower cost, scale through headcount. What the crisis revealed was that this model breaks down precisely where the value lives: regions with different business rules, a hundred hostile stakeholders, and inventories requiring someone who understands the client’s business logic to the last exception.
The work is now becoming the firm’s offering. A layered model where nearshore handles political prospection and stakeholder navigation, offshore handles execution. The Target Operating Model I am currently designing formalizes what was built under pressure into something replicable. The margin structure that comes with positioning as a transformation partner rather than a headcount supplier is fundamentally different from labor arbitrage.
The two colleagues I promoted into leadership are still running the operation today.
WHAT STAYED WITH ME
Transformation carries a cost that sits outside any project plan. Political capital, personal energy, institutional goodwill. I spent all three faster than I replenished them. That calibration, knowing exactly what change costs in human terms and choosing where to pay it, is something I now carry as an operating principle.
I would make different choices about pace and political sequencing. I would not change the decision to act.
REQUEST THE FULL CASE FILE
The full case file documents the seventy-two-hour proposal, the ORBITA-BA restructuring plan, the Swing Model architecture, the weekly throughput data, and the political sequencing that made the intervention survivable. Nine pages, PDF, available on request.
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