A global oil and gas service company had grown successfully for decades through decentralised decision-making. Local autonomy delivered speed in the early years, but at enterprise scale it produced a different reality.
Senior leaders were responsible for thousands of engineers and hundreds of product initiatives, yet they could not answer basic questions with confidence:
- Where is investment actually going?
- Which products are constrained, and why?
- What delivery risks are emerging before they become failures?
The underlying system had quietly fractured:
- 27 separate Azure DevOps and TFS collections
- Over 800 active projects
- More than 900 custom processes and workflows
Even teams working on the same product were using different fields, forms, and definitions of work. Reporting existed, but it could not be trusted. Visibility was local, not organisational.
The Leadership Risk
This was not a tooling inconvenience. It was a governance failure.
When every team defines work differently:
- Enterprise reporting collapses
- Investment decisions rely on anecdotes
- Duplication becomes invisible
- Leaders manage by exception and escalation
Senior leaders recognised that without intervention, scale itself had become the constraint.
The Ask from Senior Leadership
Leadership committed to a bold outcome:
- Consolidate fragmented systems
- Standardise how work is represented
- Enable enterprise-level visibility and collaboration
- Achieve this without halting delivery or triggering organisational revolt
This required more than policy. It required system-level change.
The Diagnosis Provided
The assessment identified three systemic constraints that leadership needed to address.
Inconsistent definitions of work destroyed coherence Hundreds of customised processes meant that roll-ups, dashboards, and portfolio views were structurally unreliable.
Structural silos reinforced duplication Funding and decision-making aligned to regional technology centres rather than products, causing parallel work and fragmented ownership.
Leadership lacked a usable control surface Code was flowing, features were shipping, but leaders had no dependable way to see flow of value, emerging risks, or comparative performance.
This was not a people problem. It was the inevitable outcome of unmanaged decentralisation.
The Advisory and Delivery Approach
The engagement combined system design, automation, and leadership alignment.
Senior leaders were supported through a multi-year modernisation that included:
Creation of a single, standard work model A unified organisational process was defined, enabling consistent work item structure, traceability, and reporting without forcing identical workflows.
Automated large-scale migration capability Custom automation was developed to safely transform and migrate data at scale, reducing risk and eliminating manual effort.
Phased consolidation strategy More than 800 projects were progressively migrated and regrouped, reducing collections from 27 to 7 while maintaining delivery continuity.
Mandate paired with negotiation Leadership set clear expectations for standardisation, while teams were actively engaged to ensure local needs were respected within the global model.
Creation of an internal capability A permanent DevOps consulting function was established to support teams, sustain standards, and prevent regression.
This was not a “big bang” change. It was disciplined, incremental, and governed.
What Changed for Leadership
The outcomes were structural and enduring:
- Enterprise visibility became reliable and comparable
- Collaboration across teams and locations became normal, not exceptional
- Duplication was exposed and reduced
- Infrastructure complexity and cost were significantly lowered
- Leaders could forecast delivery risks earlier and make better-informed investment decisions
Most importantly, leadership regained the ability to see and steer the system, not just react to it.
Why This Matters to Senior Leaders
Many large organisations reach a point where decentralisation turns from strength to liability. The signals are familiar:
- Too many tools, too many processes
- Inconsistent data
- Endless “alignment” conversations with no shared facts
This case demonstrates that consolidation is not about control. It is about restoring coherence so leadership can function.
The Strategic Insight
Engineering excellence at scale depends on clean, coherent systems of work.
When leaders can see clearly, teams can move faster. When work is defined consistently, autonomy becomes sustainable. When fragmentation is addressed deliberately, scale stops being a tax.
That is the role of effective technical leadership: designing systems where clarity, accountability, and adaptability can coexist.
Assess Whether Fragmentation Is Preventing Leadership Visibility
If you cannot answer basic questions about investment, constraints, or emerging risks with confidence, or if reporting is unreliable due to inconsistent systems, a diagnostic conversation can identify how to restore governance coherence at scale.
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