The Briefing.
Strategic Briefings.
Ask five people on your leadership team what the new system is for, and you'll get five answers. That gap doesn't close on its own, and every decision after it gets harder.
Data and systems briefing · Transformation workshop · Board session
When the team
isn't reading from
the same page.
Choosing a new system
A replacement is on the table. Operations talk about process, finance talk about cost, IT talk about integration. Everyone's right in their own way, and nothing moves.
Stuck in evaluation
Too many vendors, too many demos. The team can't pick a direction because they haven't agreed on the problem yet.
Before a go-live
A migration or launch is weeks away. Leadership needs a shared picture of what success looks like before things start moving.
Board or investor session
Trustees or investors want a straight read on where you are with data and systems. Not a pitch deck. A real conversation.
Reframing how data is treated
Data and reporting keep getting handed to IT as an afterthought. You want the leadership team to think about it differently before that becomes the culture.
Strategy day or offsite
The start of a year, a planning week, an offsite. A chance to agree on language and direction before everyone heads back into the work.
What I do
A single session, or a short series. I work through the system, data or operations question you're facing, and leave the team with a common way of talking about it.
What it produces
A team that stops circling the same arguments and starts making decisions.
What it isn't
Not a vendor pitch. No tools to sell, no platforms to recommend. Just the thinking your team needs to get unstuck.
Keynote or workshop · Shaped to your situation · No vendor agenda
A practitioner's view,
plain-spoken.
I've spent over a decade running the data and systems work that sits under core operations: migrations, replacements, reporting, and the operating models around them, across ERP, finance, CRM and data platforms. And I've sat with the leadership teams trying to make sense of it all.
So a session with me isn't a generic talk on digital transformation. It's built around the decision you're actually weighing up, from someone who has owned the outcome on the other side.
If this is
your situation.
Tell me where the conversations keep getting stuck. I'll build the session around it.
What people
ask first.
- What is a strategic briefing?
- A focused session, run as a keynote or a workshop, that gets a leadership team to a clear, useful view on something complicated. Shaped to your situation rather than pulled off a shelf.
- What topics do you cover?
- Data strategy, picking or replacing a core system, and what it actually takes for a transformation to stick. Other topics on request.
- How is this different from a vendor workshop?
- Vendor workshops point at the vendor's product. I don't have one to sell. Your team leaves with their own view, and a clear sense of what to do next.
- Who is it for?
- Leadership teams, boards and programme teams sitting in front of a system, data or operations call, and audiences who want a practitioner's read rather than a sales pitch.
- How do I book one?
- Drop me a note with the topic, the audience and the kind of format you have in mind. We'll figure out the shape on a first call.
Words from the room.
A handful of notes from leaders, founders and chairs I've worked alongside.
Barbs walked into a programme that had been stuck for nine months and had us all reading off the same page inside a fortnight. The plan we left with was the one we actually ran.
She tells you what she thinks. No fluff, no vendor agenda. Our board got a read on our data we could finally act on, and a short list of fixes we could start on Monday.
Having Barbs in the room changed how we made the call. She knew the context from month two and saved us from at least one expensive mistake on the systems side.