IT transformation & operating model build — $90M manufacturer, Pacific Northwest
The Dumpster Was on Fire. Nobody Had Noticed.
A CFO called me after he dismissed his IT Manager. The company was a $90M manufacturer with 600 employees, three manufacturing locations, and a $12M building remodel about to begin. IT had hard deadlines to hit. He needed someone who could deliver.
What I found when I walked in was worse than a personnel problem.
The outgoing IT manager had approved a hyperconverged infrastructure built on vendor claims nobody had verified. The included disaster recovery solution didn't exist when we asked the vendor directly. A Wi-Fi architecture had been designed and sold without the vendor ever setting foot in the building. The phone system carried $600 a month in unused 800 numbers from a sales process retired a decade ago. A manufacturing planning tool, requiring six headcount, had been layered on top of Oracle, producing duplicate data entry. The planners did not trust the tools so they built their own plans.
Lastly there was Citrix. Every workstation in the company, office and manufacturing floor, ran through a VDI environment where a single server glitch took down the entire company. This happened weekly. The solution is designed for 1,000 users. The company had fewer than 100. When I left, the team gave me a 3D printed statue of a dumpster on fire. Which described most Monday mornings.
Underneath all of this was one person keeping things running. A young help desk analyst who had quietly become the load-bearing wall of the entire IT operation. He was technically sharp, respected by employees, and completely invisible in the room because the existing dynamic made it too dangerous to be visible.
The building remodel deadline didn't move. We built a project structure the organization had never seen, a Go/ No Go decision, rollback plan if something went wrong and a single accountable on Monday morning. Not every cutover went smoothly. One Sunday we rolled back a core switch upgrade after a chaotic sequence of events which included unauthorized changes on the production network. We brought the network back up in time for the business to open on Monday. This was the first time the CFO had seen a failed cutover not led to business downtime.
Over two years the IT architecture got rebuilt. Citrix was replaced with standard desktops at half the cost. The vendor relationship which produced the hyperconverged environments and the Wi-Fi solution without discovery, had been closed. A ticketing system, a project methodology, and a prioritization process were built from scratch.
The technical gatekeeper who had been untouchable for over a decade retired the Friday before we moved into the renovated office. His last few months he'd started saying he wasn't sure he was needed anymore.
The help desk analyst went on to land a help desk manager role at another company, implementing the same processes under his own vision.
The CFO didn't call me because IT was broken. He called me because he'd lost confidence that anyone inside the organization could tell him the truth about what was actually wrong within IT.
When leadership stops getting straight answers from IT about risk, about spending, about what's actually working, the organization doesn't just have an IT problem. It has a decision-making problem. The chaos is real. But it didn't start with technology.
I start with the decision making process.