Stuart Kitching

Curzon began with a rapid but thorough diagnostic, reviewing performance data and engaging senior stakeholders internally and externally to establish a clear picture of where value was being lost. A key early output was an objective evaluation of the outsourcing question: our analysis concluded that retaining the service in-house was the stronger strategic option, directly challenging the prevailing internal recommendation.

With that decision reframed, we moved into a structured programme of performance improvement interventions. These targeted the root causes of underperformance across the supply chain: improving supplier OTIF through tighter schedule adherence and lead time compression; aggregating demand to unlock contractual price-breaks; rationalising the supplier base and renegotiating contracts; and reducing transactional volume and cost through order aggregation and automation.

We also designed a future-state operating model to lock in the gains achieved, ensuring the improvements were structural and sustainable, not just a one-off uplift.

Curzon worked in close partnership with the client’s Water sector leadership and its wider Technology and Consulting organisation — bringing structure and external challenge to what needed to be an internally owned transformation. The centrepiece of our approach was a series of Executive Workshops, designed and facilitated by Curzon, that brought together key stakeholders to build alignment, surface best practices, and mobilise action.

The workshops were carefully sequenced to address the foundational building blocks of the growth ambition: developing a genuine understanding of Water sector client needs; taking stock of the group’s existing capabilities; shaping compelling Consulting and Technology value propositions; and constructing a credible marketing and sales narrative.

Rather than delivering a strategy and stepping back, Curzon focused on ensuring the organisation had the roadmap, the governance, and the momentum to carry the transformation forward itself — with internal delivery responsibilities clearly defined from day one.

Curzon’s approach was comprehensive and hands-on, working directly alongside the management team rather than from the outside, and involving the full leadership group in designing and owning the transformation from the outset.

A cross-functional planning process was implemented to create, for the first time, a coherent and shared view of demand, delivery priorities, and the factory’s real capacity to deliver against them. With that foundation in place, Curzon worked alongside management to establish control across Production, Purchasing, Planning, and Inventory Management, four functions that had previously operated without adequate coordination or accountability.

Lean capabilities were introduced on the shop floor, improving productivity while simultaneously building a culture of ownership among the workforce. Commercial management was strengthened to ensure revenues were being effectively captured and operational costs actively managed. Capital investment in facilities, already sanctioned, was aligned with the operational reorganisation to maximise its impact.

The transformation was designed to be owned by the site’s own people, not sustained by external support, and the results reflected that: a workforce that understood what was required of them, a management team with the tools and disciplines to maintain performance, and a site that had moved from an organisational liability to one of the group’s flagship operations.

Curzon’s first task was to accurately diagnose what had gone wrong — and to resist the temptation to simply accelerate a methodology that wasn’t working. Our assessment concluded that Agile, while theoretically appropriate, was not suited to the organisation’s current capabilities and ways of working. We recommended a deliberate shift to a traditional Waterfall approach — a pragmatic call that prioritised delivery over methodology orthodoxy, and one that immediately created the structure needed to start clearing the backlog.

With the delivery approach reset, Curzon turned to the backlog itself — analysing it systematically to identify quick wins that could be delivered rapidly and visibly, and defining which items needed to be prioritised to get the programme back on track. Alongside this, we worked to rebuild the team’s capability through targeted, structured hiring aligned to the Data Strategy target operating model.

Equally important was the reputational dimension. Curzon ensured that the Data team’s progress and achievements were made directly visible to senior leaders — giving the C-suite genuine line-of-sight into the recovery effort and rapidly rebuilding the trust and credibility that had been lost. By making the team accountable to leadership in a transparent and structured way, we turned visibility from a risk into an asset.