Programme direction · IT consultancy
RAID
Director-led IT programme consultancy for work that has to hold.
Director-led IT programme management and consultancy in the United Kingdom. Independent. Cloud, identity, infrastructure — and the operational work that decides whether change holds.
- Director-led
- The person who scopes the work stays close to it.
- Scale
- Programmes in the tens of millions.
- Tenure
- Trading floors in 1999. Critical infrastructure now.
- Base
- United Kingdom · Hampton / London.
What we do
Programme management and IT consultancy
Senior programme management and IT consultancy. No theatre, and no work taken on that cannot be done properly.
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01
Programme direction
Governance, planning, and delivery of multi-workstream technology programmes. Scope, risk, dependencies, and outcomes kept current and reported as they are.
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02
Interim IT leadership
Director-level cover for transformation, operations, and service portfolios. P&L, vendors, and a team that stays close to the work — not a bench handed down after the sale.
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03
Identity and workplace
Identity, access, and workplace programmes that organisations have to live with after go-live. Secure change that also has to be usable.
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04
Cloud and infrastructure
Cloud, platform, and infrastructure programmes structured so they land: sequencing, readiness, and the operational detail that decides whether a change holds.
Where the work has been
Selected work
Named engagements, newest first. Not a CV — the work that had to hold, written as it was done.
- Healthcare technology
- Energy & utilities
- Insurance
- Financial services
- Retail
- Hospitality
- Essential services
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Mar 2025 – present
Tunstall Healthcare
Delivery Change Manager
Telecare programme through the analogue switch-off
Technology Enabled Care sits on the analogue telephone network that BT is switching off. The work is to land a portfolio of change — ISDN to SIP, Smartnumbers onto a next-generation platform, and a network refresh across three data centres — without interrupting monitoring for people who depend on it. The Department of Health and Social Care is in the room. So are BT, Hitachi, Verizon, and a hard national deadline.
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Aug – Nov 2024
Bell Integration
Customer Programme Director
Customer-side programme direction for live IT estates
The customer side of IT outsourcing: transition, live service, and the P&L of the portfolio. Two large clients, kept moving through change while the numbers and the relationship stayed honest.
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Nov 2020 – Mar 2024
SSE
Business Transformation & Change
Zero-trust workplace and Azure landing
Secure flexible working and a return to office, on a zero-trust model rather than a VPN bolted on at the end. Direct Internet Access and PKI-as-a-service so the estate could actually move to Azure. The DIA work was structured to cut run cost — on the order of half — not to add another circuit. Forty to sixty people, five partners, and a smart-metering workstream that had to stay aligned with UK regulation.
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Aug – Oct 2020
Sagacity, for Thames Water
Consultant IT Programme Manager
Risk-based customer segmentation on Azure
Phase one of a risk-based customer segmentation programme. Equifax in the data path, Azure underneath, and a first landing that had to hold when the unexpected showed up.
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Jan – Jul 2020
Mitchells & Butlers
Consultant IT Programme Manager
Fujitsu estate recovery and cloud-first Azure proposal
A delayed, Fujitsu-outsourced estate. First solid landing by May. Then a cloud-first Azure proposal and an RFP, before Covid brought the contract to a close.
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Aug 2019 – Jan 2020
Philip Morris International
Consultant IT Programme Manager
Azure platform and Accenture–IBM to Infosys transition
A new Azure platform for a UK-based global group, and a vendor transition from Accenture and IBM to Infosys — about 150 people — without losing the operational thread.
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Sep 2018 – Jun 2019
New Signature
Consultant IT Programme Manager
Office 365 and Windows 10 for Clear Channel and Irwin Mitchell
Two different programmes. Clear Channel International had to be separated from iHeartMedia: Office 365, Active Directory and Windows 10 for 5,000 people across 22 countries — and the end date came forward six months. Irwin Mitchell started as an eight-week discovery with hundreds of staff, then a Windows 10 and Office 365 programme with a two-year horizon.
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Jan 2015 – Aug 2018
Rank Group
Consultant IT Programme Manager
Grosvenor and Mecca digital estate onto Azure
First, Darwin: take Grosvenor and Mecca’s digital estate off a Guernsey OpenBet platform and onto Azure, with Bede. £12 million CAPEX. Live on 29 February 2016. The Guernsey data centre was gone in eight weeks. Then Grosvenor One: one account and wallet across retail and digital, Profisee for a single customer view, Feedzai in the path, and a middleware layer that had to join it all. Omnichannel that customers could actually use.
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Apr 2013 – Jan 2015
Legal & General
Programme Manager, then Head of IT Service Governance
Windows 7 recovery, then IT service governance
A failing Windows 7 refresh: 7,500 people, £10 million, applications cut from about 3,500 to 600, and the user work brought in properly with The Inform Team. Then the service job: £62 million of IT operations, the IBM estate, an 8% drop in in-year run cost, ServiceNow as the system of record, and a first production landing of AWS, IBM Softlayer and Azure.
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Jan 2010 – Jan 2013
2e2
Director of Projects & Programmes
RBS and Marks & Spencer programme leadership
Two of the firm’s largest accounts: RBS and Marks & Spencer. Professional services on the order of £48 million a year at RBS and £8 million at M&S. Led the bid that won a three-year managed-services contract with M&S, then grew the account rather than handing it off. M&S ranked 2e2 first among 25 suppliers, including Accenture.
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2001 – 2009
Credit Suisse
Distributed Operations Manager, EMEA
EMEA Windows trading infrastructure
Windows trading infrastructure that could not take an outage inflicted by change. A team of engineers, then coordination across Unix, database and Windows for the region — up to seventy people — in a front-office, live-trading setting.
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1999 – 2001
Deutsche Bank, via Logical
Windows Support Engineer, then Technical Team Leader
Trading-floor engineering
Trading-floor engineering. Promoted within seven months. Third-line support, upgrades that had to land, and a helpdesk that had to work when the floor was open.
How the work is done
Approach
RAID is a small UK consultancy. Engagements are led by the director, not handed down a bench. The aim is a programme that holds together under pressure, and a client organisation that can run what has been built.
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Outcome before tooling
Start from what must be true when the work is finished. Technology choices follow that, not the other way around.
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Senior throughout
The person who scopes the work stays close to it. Status, risk, and decisions stay at a level the organisation can act on.
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Honest control
Plans are kept current. Exceptions are named early. Governance is there to decide, not to decorate a slide pack.
How a programme actually works
What has to be in the room
A programme is not one team with a plan. It is the organisation, briefly made to work as one. Touch any part.
Every line is a conversation that has to happen. Miss one, and the landing does not hold.
On who you put on the work
Give the important work to people who have already done it
A critical programme, haemorrhaging cash, and the chief executive could not name who was running it. When they found a name, the reason for the appointment was: he was between jobs.
That is how business-critical work still gets staffed. Someone free. Someone cheap. Someone who can “pick it up”. Then the organisation is surprised when the landing does not hold.
Done well, this work looks effortless. Done badly, it costs a lot of money to put right. The right pairing is a person who has already delivered this kind of change, put against the programme that actually matters.
I have spent twenty-five years on the programmes organisations cannot afford to get wrong — trading floors that could not take an outage, a Windows refresh that was already failing, a digital estate that had to come off a data centre in Guernsey, a telecare network that has to survive the analogue switch-off. The pattern is the same. The work is treated as a chore until it is in trouble. Then someone senior is asked to recover it.
Software does not run the programme. A RAID log does not make the decision. People who have seen the failure modes do. They live a little ahead of the current week: what could go wrong, what we would do, whether the organisation can still say no. They stay close to the work rather than handing it down a bench after the sale.
If the outcome is business-critical, hire for that. Not for availability.
On the people who have to live with it
Users first
Programmes fail when adoption is left until last. Bring the people work in early, with specialists who can do it properly.
My biggest regret is not engaging The Inform Team sooner.
Get in touch
Contact
To discuss a programme or an advisory engagement, write directly. There is no form and no mailing list.
Leon Spight, Director
[email protected]
United Kingdom · Hampton / London