What Happens After the Big Consultancy Leaves
- Darren Emery
- Oct 6
- 8 min read
A CTO’s Field Guide to Turning Glossy Transformation Decks into Real Results.
Your transformation doesn't fail when consultants leave - it fails when your organisation isn't ready to change what they uncover.
If your company has just finished a multi-million-pound transformation with one of the Big Four or a global consultancy, this piece is for you.
The consultants didn't fail you. Your organisation did.
That's actually good news, because it means you own the recovery. And recovery is exactly what most organisations need after a big consultancy engagement wraps up.
The strategic roadmap looks brilliant, the slide deck is immaculate, and everyone nods enthusiastically in the final presentation. Then the consultants board their flight home, and within six weeks, you're staring at a SharePoint folder full of deliverables that nobody quite knows how to execute.
If you're a CTO reading this, you're in exactly the right place. You've paid for the map - now you need to walk the terrain.
This article shows you how to do that without re-buying the map, and without turning your engineering organisation into a permanent professional-services client.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Recent research from Bain & Company reveals that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions - only 12% actually deliver what they promised.
Even more sobering: BCG's latest research shows that more than two-thirds of large-scale tech programmes miss their targets for time, budget or scope.
Read those numbers again. We're not talking about a slight miss or a rounding error. We're talking about systematic, predictable failure across the vast majority of transformation efforts.
The cost? For a typical large company, a single failed programme can exceed £20 million per year.
The difference between the 12% who succeed and the 88% who don't isn't better PowerPoints or smarter strategies. It's what happens in the weeks and months after the consultants leave. It's whether you've built the internal capability to sustain the change once the external expertise disappears.
McKinsey’s 2023 research found that within 12 months of major transformation programmes, over 60% of organisations lose operational discipline on the new processes introduced - primarily due to weak ownership transfer.
If you can't own the change, you've simply paid a premium for a temporary delay of the inevitable return to the old ways.
The Reality Nobody Mentions
Big consultancies are brilliant at three things: diagnosing, designing, and "dramatising" transformation. They're considerably less brilliant at the slow, boring, human work that actually embeds change once the billable teams go home.
Think of it this way: hiring a Big Four for digital transformation after big 4 consultancy is like buying a luxury car and leaving it in the driveway because nobody taught you how to fuel it.
The consultant hands you the keys and a glossy handbook, but it's your mechanics - your teams - who must keep it running. Without that transfer of competence, you've just bought yourself an expensive ornament.
The consultant leaves. Your people stay. That means the phase that determines success isn't the flashy 90-day "sprint" with steering committees and war rooms - it's the follow-on months when your teams translate strategy into daily decisions and trade-offs.
Get that part right and you deliver lasting value. Get it wrong and you're left with a beautiful, expensive artifact gathering digital dust.
The Core Problem: Misaligned Incentives
Consultants are incentive-aligned to diagnose, design, and hand over. You're incentive-aligned to run the engine. Those incentives rarely line up perfectly.
When the consultancy departs, three things happen with depressing predictability:
Ownership evaporates. The neat deliverable becomes "their plan," not "our plan." Nobody feels true accountability because it was built by people who are no longer in the building.
Capability gaps appear. The organisation discovers it can't sustain the new practices. Critical skills are missing. Governance frameworks look good on paper but crumble under real-world pressure. Your teams don't have the data fluency or engineering muscle to keep the engine running.
Momentum stalls. Early wins are small and fragmentary. The backlog fills with "action items" that never feed into outcomes. Six months later, you're back to the old ways of working, just with better terminology. It’s like hiring a personal trainer for three months, then expecting to stay fit without ever setting foot in the gym again.
Fixing this is neither dramatic nor expensive. It's deliberate.
The CTO Playbook: Practical Steps You Can Implement This Quarter
1. Move ownership from supplier artifact to internal asset (Day 0–30)
Geoffrey A. Moore wrote: "Most companies fail to cross the chasm because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus."
He was talking about technology adoption, but the wisdom applies perfectly here. Consultants often create a menu of appealing options. Your job is to choose two and do them exceptionally well.
Actions:
Appoint a single accountable owner - not a committee - with authority to make decisions and the mandate to produce a 90-day operating plan. Call them the Transformation Product Owner. Give them real power, not ceremonial responsibility.
Convert the consultancy's roadmaps into a living 12-week plan with measurable outcomes (not tasks). Remove anything that reads like a wish list. If you can't measure it in 90 days, you can't manage it.
Why it works: Decision friction equals execution friction. One owner removes both. This step prevents the fatal "their plan versus our plan" split that kills momentum.
2. Triangulate the recommendations against hard outcomes (Day 0–30)
Actions:
For every major recommendation, ask: "What measurable business outcome does this unlock in 90 days?" If the answer is vague, the recommendation isn't ready.
Create a decision log that records why you picked one recommendation over another. This reduces rework and protects momentum when stakeholders inevitably question your choices six months later.
Quick metric to add now:
Pick three KPIs that matter to the board - cycle time, average time-to-value, revenue per feature, whatever - and map each recommendation to one of these KPIs. If the mapping is weak, reprioritise ruthlessly.
3. Build the capability plan, not just the org chart (Day 30–90)
Here's where most transformations quietly collapse. You can't execute a sophisticated digital strategy with a team that lacks the underlying skills. It's like handing someone a Formula 1 car when they've only ever driven a Ford Transit.
Actions:
Identify capability gaps exposed by the consultant's plan. Be honest about what's missing: technical skills, tooling know-how, modern engineering practices, product thinking.
For each gap, assign a time-boxed capability owner and a transfer plan: training plus shadowing plus responsibility handover. Use short, measurable milestones (for example: "Team A can run independent sprint retrospectives by week six without external facilitation").
Bain's research consistently shows the difference between transformation success and failure is investment in talent and capability, not better slide decks or more ambitious strategies.
4. Make the budget shift explicit (Day 0–90)
If your budget line still says "consulting" nine months after handover, you haven't actually taken ownership. You've just changed suppliers.
Actions:
Move budget from "consulting" to "internal capability" in stages. Keep some external support for the first two quarters but shrink it purposefully. Think 60/40, then 40/60, then 20/80 over 12 months.
Require suppliers to price for knowledge transfer and time-to-independence, not just deliverables. If they can't articulate what "done" looks like, they're selling dependency.
Why:
Consultants can accelerate early momentum, but indefinite reliance is expensive and signals you're not building internal capability. Your CFO will thank you later.
5. Create a sustain plan for governance and escalation (Day 30–120)
Actions:
Define governance for decisions that actually matter. Who decides trade-offs between scope, budget and timeline? How are those decisions communicated? Put this in a one-page governance charter, not a 40-slide deck that nobody reads.
Set a decision check every quarter. Decisions older than six months with no action attached get re-examined. Either act on them or bin them.
6. Replace checklists with feedback loops (Day 30+)
The consultant's plan is built on assumptions that were valid in the week they interviewed your stakeholders. Some of those assumptions are already wrong. Accept that and build accordingly.
Actions:
Replace long checklists of deliverables with feedback loops. Run short experiments, measure outcomes, iterate.
Reintroduce discovery as a continuous function, not a front-loaded phase. Even the best plan needs learning.
This is the essence of effective transformation: Adapt to real feedback, align the organisation to outcomes, accelerate by removing friction. No plan survives first contact with reality unchanged.
The Human Factor (the bit consultants gloss over)
When consultants leave, two human dynamics determine whether change sticks:
Psychological ownership. People need to feel the plan is theirs. Visibility and small wins build that feeling. Mandate and PowerPoints don't.
Capacity versus will. Capability gaps are fixable. Exhaustion isn't. If your teams are running at 110% capacity, they won't have the energy to try new ways of working. They'll revert to familiar patterns because that's what humans do under pressure.
Practical move:
Declare a protected "transformation sprint" every fourth sprint for the first six months after handover. Use it for capability work, not new features. Small cost, massive signalling effect.
How to Talk to Your Board Tomorrow
Use a short, honest message that demonstrates control:
"We've completed the discovery and received a robust plan. To make it real, we're shifting from supplier-led design to internal ownership. Over the next 90 days we'll appoint an accountable owner, map recommendations to three board KPIs, and run time-boxed capability transfer sprints. We'll also reduce external support month-on-month and measure readiness objectively. I'll bring the 90-day plan to the next board meeting."
Short, confident, actionable. The board wants clarity and accountability - give them both, and they'll back you.
Common Traps (and how to avoid them)
Trap: Keeping consultants on as permanent advisors.
Fix: Time-box external help and price it for transfer of competence, not perpetual advisory.
Trap: Letting the plan sit in a slide deck.
Fix: Convert it into a living 12-week plan with named owners and KPI mappings.
Trap: Celebrating the handover as an endpoint.
Fix: Treat handover as phase start: "Run the engine" begins at week zero.
When to Bring Someone Back
(yes, sometimes you should)
If you lack internal capability and you've genuinely done the transfer work above, a short, targeted re-engagement can accelerate progress. But it must be scoped to capability transfer, not to "re-diagnose the same problem differently."
Think apprenticeship model, not repeat consultancy. You’re paying for coaching, not confession.
Your 90-day Checklist
Report back to your CEO and board with this:
Appoint an internal Transformation Product Owner (name plus mandate)
Produce a 90-day living plan mapped to three board KPIs
Time-box supplier support and publish a handover schedule
Identify top three capability gaps and assign owners with learning transfer plans
Protect capacity: one transformation sprint every four sprints for six months
Run weekly outcome reviews, monthly readiness heatmaps, quarterly governance checks
What Happens Next
You hired the experts to build the plan. Now you need to turn it into durable capability. The difference between organisations that succeed and those that don't isn't the quality of the consultant's slides - it's the discipline and focus you bring to the months after they leave.
If you want support with this, we run a 90-minute post-handover readiness workshop with CTOs and their senior stakeholders. We map the consultant output to outcomes, name the owners, and produce the first 90-day plan you can start executing on Monday. No slides longer than one page. No jargon. Just a plan you own.
If that sounds useful, book a 20-minute call and bring the consultant's final deck. We'll treat it like a field guide, not a sacred text - and we'll help you turn it into something your organisation can actually execute.
Because the map is useless if nobody knows how to read it.
