You have just stepped in as the Interim COO or Operating Partner. The portfolio company's flagship ERP migration is marked "Green" on the steering committee deck, yet the go-live date has slipped twice, and the budget variance is widening. You do not have a technology problem; you have a governance problem.
We call this the Decision Latency Tax. In traditional PE turnarounds, leadership often confuses activity with progress. They schedule monthly steering committees while the project team waits weeks for critical architectural decisions. This latency is fatal. According to the Project Management Institute, 47% of project failures are directly attributed to poor decision-making processes. Every day your project sits in decision purgatory, your IRR erodes.
The math is brutal. McKinsey & Company data reveals that large IT projects run 45% over budget on average, but the correlation with time is even starker: every additional year spent on a project increases cost overruns by 15%. If you are "Transition Tom," you do not have a year. You barely have a quarter.
To stop the bleeding, you must dismantle the monthly steering committee and replace it with a high-velocity governance model. Data from the Institute of Project Management (IPM) indicates that projects with robust, rapid decision-making structures are 2.5 times more likely to succeed than those with ad-hoc governance.
Stop all non-critical development. Your goal is to identify the backlog of unmade decisions. Conduct a "Decision Audit" to categorize pending items into three buckets:
Establish a physical or virtual "War Room." The core rule is simple: No decision remains unmade for more than 24 hours. If the primary decision-maker is unavailable, authority delegates automatically to a designated deputy. This eliminates the bottleneck. Research supports this aggression: organizations that make decisions quickly are twice as likely to report superior financial returns compared to their slower peers.
Your new governance cadence requires a cultural shift. Banish PowerPoint status reports. In the War Room, you review live data and blockers only.
The market does not reward effort; it rewards outcomes. By compressing decision cycles, you do not just save a project; you demonstrate the operational alpha that drives multiple expansion at exit.
