Community Connect - August

By August, a program that started with the new financial year is roughly a month old. The launch buzz has gone. Real delivery pressure has arrived, and the setup calls nobody pushed back on are quietly starting to bite. By that point most delivery leads are too deep in the work to notice what's slipping underneath them.

Ellis Richardson has spent 20 years at the delivery end of big transformation programs. He knows what early drift looks like on the ground, and it's rarely the version that reaches a status report. Marcus sits down with him to get into the signals worth watching, why capable people wave them past even when something feels off, and what a delivery lead can actually do in the short window before a program's direction sets.

Expect a straight conversation. The sort of thing you'd usually only hear once the recording stops.

This is a…