Problems › Business Transformation Consulting
Business transformation consulting is a large, multi-workstream engagement that redesigns how a company operates — typically £250k to several million, six to twenty-four months, delivered by a team on site. It is the right instrument when the operating model itself is the problem and you need capacity to execute, not just a decision. It is the wrong instrument when what you actually lack is the diagnosis. If you cannot yet name which two or three things are wrong, buying delivery capacity first is how a transformation becomes expensive without becoming different. Percision produces the diagnosis — the portfolio view, the sequence, the case — in hours rather than months, and tells you plainly when the answer is that you need people on the ground.
Business transformation consulting is a large, multi-workstream engagement that redesigns how a company operates — typically £250k to several million, six to twenty-four months, delivered by a team on site. It is the right instrument when the operating model itself is the problem and you need capacity to execute, not just a decision. It is the wrong instrument when what you actually lack is the diagnosis. If you cannot yet name which two or three things are wrong, buying delivery capacity first is how a transformation becomes expensive without becoming different. Percision produces the diagnosis — the portfolio view, the sequence, the case — in hours rather than months, and tells you plainly when the answer is that you need people on the ground.
A transformation engagement bundles three separable things: finding out what is wrong, deciding what to do about it, and having enough hands to do it. Firms sell them together because that is how the economics work — the diagnostic phase is priced near cost and earns its money by scoping the delivery phase that follows. That is not a scandal, it is a business model, but it has a consequence worth understanding before you sign. The people producing your diagnosis are commercially better off if the diagnosis is large.
The published failure rates for these programmes have hovered around 70% for thirty years, which is itself informative. A discipline that fails most of the time at something it has practised for decades is not failing at execution. It is usually failing earlier, at the point where a genuine question — which parts of this business earn their cost of capital, and which of them can we actually change this year — got converted into a workstream plan before it was answered.
The practical test is whether you can currently name the two or three things that are wrong, in the order you would fix them, with the arithmetic attached. If you can, you have a delivery problem, and buying delivery capacity is a rational purchase. If you cannot, you have a diagnosis problem, and every pound spent on delivery capacity before the diagnosis exists is a pound spent making the wrong change more thoroughly.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) is the analysis that produces the first half: what the portfolio actually looks like once cost and capital are allocated honestly, which units are funding which, what changes and in what order. It does not put people on the ground and does not pretend to. Where the honest answer is that you need forty consultants for nine months, it will say so — which is a cheaper way to find that out than the first invoice.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The word "transformation" is being used before anyone has agreed what is broken
✓ A scoping document exists and a diagnosis does not
✓ The programme has workstreams named after departments rather than after problems
The move that usually makes it worse. Buying the diagnosis from the firm that will bid to deliver the remedy, which reliably produces a diagnosis with a large remedy attached.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
The diagnosis changes with the shape of the business. Each of these works the same question through one industry's actual economics, with an excerpt from a real analysis run on a company of that type.
It routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5), one of 29 engagements. The output is a sequence with a stopping rule — which move first, what it funds next, and the observation that would say it is not working — rather than a list of things you could consider.
Read a complete report before deciding whether it is worth your time.
For a mid-market company the diagnostic phase alone is commonly £75k–£250k over six to ten weeks, and the delivery phase that follows is usually several multiples of that. Large-firm day rates run roughly £1,500–£3,500 for a consultant and £4,000–£8,000 for a partner, and a typical team blends the two so the effective rate lands somewhere in the middle. The number that matters is not the day rate, though — it is the ratio of diagnosis to delivery, because that is where the scope is set.
No, and any tool that claims otherwise is selling you something. Software cannot run a programme office, hold a difficult conversation with a divisional MD, or supply forty people for nine months. What it can do is produce the analysis that decides whether you need those things, and what they should be pointed at — which is the part that is most often rushed and most expensive to get wrong.
Buy the diagnosis separately from whoever will deliver, and write the decision down before you take delivery bids. Once the two or three changes are named and the arithmetic is on paper, the delivery tender is a procurement exercise with a fixed brief. Once they are not, the tender sets its own brief, and it is always a larger one.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
Describe the situation in your own words and we will tell you which analysis answers it — before you sign up for anything.
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