Why Mentor Was Built This Way
For thirty years, I have watched organisations discover the same painful truth too late.
The problem that eventually brings a major program to its knees was usually there near the beginning, while everything still looked fine.
The program may have been scrutinised repeatedly. What nobody had properly tested was whether the organisation around it could actually deliver it.
That’s largely why Mentor exists.
Most organisations can run most programs themselves. Mentor concentrates on the ones that cross a threshold, when they become business-critical and exceed what the normal delivery system can handle.
I trained as an accountant, but spent most of my earlier career running flagship programs in the computer industry. That’s where I learned the disciplines of complex execution and the importance of catching problems at source before they become vastly more expensive downstream.
I took those disciplines into telecoms as Program Director for System X at Plessey, responsible for the joint public-switching development with GEC. The program was badly off track.
Plessey and GEC had first-class engineers. What needed to change was the way the work was organised and integrated. We did that, and System X was turned around and delivered.
Over the last three decades, Mentor has turned around well over a hundred major programs. The lesson kept repeating: while programs change, the failure patterns do not.
The seeds of failure are usually planted early, while everyone is still fat, happy and overconfident because nothing significant has yet had to work together.
Then the pieces have to integrate, and that is when the truth arrives.
By delivery system, I mean the machinery around the work: how decisions are made, suppliers are managed, dependencies are controlled and everything is brought together.
Mentor was built around people who already know how to make that machinery work. Everyone here had already built a successful career elsewhere. There are no trainees learning on the client’s time.
Bringing that experience in does not mean another layer of governance or a major consulting exercise. It means finding out early whether the delivery system will hold when the program starts putting real weight on it.
If your program is routine, Mentor is probably not the right partner for you.
We become relevant when the stakes are higher and failure would become a CEO or Board issue.
You can choose not to bring experienced scrutiny in early. But the risk does not disappear. As commitments harden and dependencies become harder to unwind, the organisation loses freedom to choose.
Once failure takes hold, the cost, timetable and available choices are increasingly determined by the failure itself, not by you.
That is why Mentor was built this way.
About the author
David Hilliard is Founder of Mentor, execution specialists in strategic program execution.