Establishing a Transformation Management Office for a Global Engineering Consultancy

A global engineering consultancy in the energy sector, operating across around sixty countries with roughly 35,000 employees. Following a period of significant strategic change, the client had committed to substantial cost reduction across the business, with IT identified as one of the priority areas. Multiple transformation initiatives were already underway but lacked coordination, and no central transformation management function existed to prioritise IT demand, triage these based on strategic alignment, capacity and cost constraints, validate expected savings or effectively track delivery.

Refractis was initially engaged to facilitate a focused week of workshops with the IT leadership team, triaging the portfolio of transformation initiatives and validating expected cost savings. That work identified two structural gaps: the absence of clear IT service ownership and the lack of a more formal IT Projects and Demand function. The engagement expanded into the establishment of formal projects and demand capability, with Refractis leading that function directly. Working alongside client IT leadership, we:

• Facilitated an intensive week of workshops in London to triage all initiatives, prioritise them, validate financial savings, and document delivery risks
• Built the frameworks and documentation for demand management, project delivery management, and portfolio-level reporting
• Established a fortnightly demand board and a portfolio board with clear terms of reference and defined levels of authority
• Are reshaping the IT business partner role to open meaningful communication between IT and the business, and to give the business a genuine voice in what IT delivers
• Set reporting standards for the client’s outsourced delivery provider
• Introduced a culture around delivery reporting focused on identifying reds and ambers where executive help was genuinely needed, rather than managing to green
• Extended the work into cross-tower service ownership, named end-to-end delivery ownership, and capacity management across IT domains
• Progressively transferred ownership of these functions to the client’s own employees, with the deliberate intent that the client can sustain them without ongoing Refractis presence

The client now has a functional IT Projects and Demand function, providing better visibility of its IT pipeline and control of what enters delivery. Once in delivery, the client has a clearer view of delivery progress and more rapid intervention is possible where challenges arise, as the reporting is now standardised and focused on decisions rather than simple status updates. The demand and portfolio boards run on cadence, terms of reference are documented and understood, and formal channels for raising demand have replaced the informal routes that previously dominated. Delivery reporting has meaningfully improved, with status conversations focused on the issues where executive help is genuinely needed rather than on maintaining a green front.

Communication between IT and the business has opened up in a way it had not previously, with the reshaped business partner role acting as the primary interface and the business increasingly aware of what IT can and cannot deliver at what pace. Refractis is actively embedding these capabilities into the client’s own team so that the operating model persists after the engagement ends, and the client is set up to manage its transformation portfolio on its own terms.