I am a project manager and governance specialist with twenty years in UK defence and critical national infrastructure.

The programmes I have worked on range from guided weapons and naval platforms to cyber security for the UK’s energy grid. The common thread is not sector but condition: high consequence, multiple stakeholders, genuine complexity, and accountability that cannot be diffused. I have recovered programmes that were twelve months behind schedule. I have designed governance frameworks that outlasted the programmes that created them. Twenty years of learning how complex organisations actually deliver what they committed to deliver — and why, so often, they don’t.

The governance dimension — boards, oversight, independent challenge — is where my interest is moving. Programme delivery teaches you what good governance prevents; it also teaches you exactly which questions a non-executive director should be asking that the executive team would rather not answer. I am building towards board-level work in defence and critical infrastructure, where technical complexity, public accountability and long-cycle investment intersect, and where the governance challenge is not a compliance exercise but a strategic one.

This site is where I work those questions out in public: where power actually sits, why some teams function and most don’t, how institutions fall, and what it takes to build something that holds together under real conditions. The essays draw on delivery experience, research, history, and occasionally film and fiction — used as analogy, never as evidence.

Away from all of this, I make small things slowly. Metal does not pretend: a line is either clean or it is not, and there is no report to write when it is not. There’s a quieter corner of the site for that work — in the workshop.

If any of that is interesting to you, the contact details are here.