Ten Sites, Six Months, Zero Disruption: Delivering a Complex Footprint Reduction at Pace
Outcomes
Eight of the ten targeted site closures were delivered within six months of the programme going live — ahead of schedule and with a clear, repeatable process and governance framework established for the remaining closures. Not a single site closure resulted in disruption to sales or client deliveries. The asset disposal programme achieved a 127% value recovery rate against the business case — significantly exceeding expectations. By the end of the engagement, all progress tracking had been embedded into the client’s business-as-usual operational management processes and financial benefit tracking integrated into standard financial reporting — leaving no dependency on external support.
Background
The scale and pace of the ambition created immediate complexity. Multiple enabling workstreams — covering HR and redundancies, infrastructure, and property — were operating independently, without the central coordination needed to sequence activities effectively or manage interdependencies. Regional management teams, accustomed to operating with a high degree of autonomy and protective of their local P&Ls, were resistant to the kind of centralised programme governance the transformation required.
Without a coherent, integrated plan pulling the workstreams together, the risk was clear: activities would proceed in the wrong sequence, disrupting the business’s ability to fulfil client deliveries, and the financial benefits of the programme would fail to materialise within the year.
Curzon Approach
Curzon’s first task was to create order from fragmentation — aligning the independently developed functional workstreams into a single, coherent programme before a single site closure had taken place. Pre-launch alignment was treated as a non-negotiable foundation: without it, even the best execution would have been undermined by sequencing conflicts and unmanaged interdependencies.
A clear geographical sequencing logic was developed for the programme rollout — ensuring that the capacity to fulfil client deliveries was maintained throughout, and that site closures were executed in an order that minimised commercial and operational risk. An integrated programme management framework with a clear delivery drumbeat was established to coordinate and manage the multiple workstreams, supported by programme reporting covering both operational and progress metrics at workstream and programme level.
Regional management teams — initially resistant — were actively brought into the implementation, transforming potential blockers into programme contributors. The asset disposal programme was structured with mechanisms to maximise secondary market value, ultimately delivering the 127% value recovery that significantly exceeded the original business case.
Throughout, the design principle was self-sufficiency: every governance mechanism, tracking process, and reporting framework was built to operate within the client’s existing management and reporting infrastructure — ensuring the programme’s gains would be owned and sustained by the business long after Curzon’s involvement ended.
CASE STUDIES
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Beyond the App: Reframing a Major Airport's Digital Ambition From Quick Wins to Transformative Vision
Outcomes
The engagement crystallised a new digital ambition — “Airport 3.0” — as a realistic, structured, and stretching target for the organisation. A comprehensive roadmap was built, tying together existing initiatives and the new capabilities required to realise the vision. Component costs and indicative benefits were developed to underpin a more robust investment case, giving the organisation the financial narrative needed to secure broader buy-in. A new Chief Information Officer was brought on board to champion the digital agenda — a direct outcome of the clarity the engagement had created around what the role needed to deliver.
Background
Digital activity at the airport had evolved organically rather than strategically — a collection of initiatives that had grown up around areas of existing success, most notably car parking, without a coherent vision to connect or direct them. The prevailing belief was that digital transformation was fundamentally about building a “My Airport” app — a framing that significantly underestimated both the opportunity and the complexity of what genuine digital leadership in the sector would require.
The strategy had not been developed from a customer service design perspective, leaving it disconnected from the passenger experience it was ultimately meant to shape. Digital was largely sponsored by the Commercial function and had not achieved meaningful buy-in across the senior leadership group — limiting both ambition and resource. In-house digital capability was limited, business cases for digital investment were underdeveloped, and there was little understanding across the IT community of what a more ambitious digital agenda would actually demand.
Curzon Approach
Curzon’s role was to challenge, provoke, and reframe — helping the organisation see beyond its current assumptions about what digital could and should mean for an airport of its scale and ambition. A series of structured workshops challenged prevailing thinking and opened up new lines of possibility, while benchmarking against best practice inside and outside the aviation sector gave the client both inspiration and evidence for a more stretching vision.
Gap analysis identified the capabilities the organisation would need to develop to realise a genuinely transformative digital agenda — providing an honest assessment of the distance between current state and future ambition. Financial implications of the revised vision were assessed, translating strategic aspiration into the commercial language needed to build a credible investment case and secure board-level commitment.
The output was not just a strategy document — it was a shared understanding of the challenge, a structured roadmap with real sequencing, and the organisational momentum to act. The appointment of a new CIO to champion the agenda was a tangible signal that the engagement had moved the organisation from ambiguity to conviction.
CASE STUDIES
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From Compliance Culture to Performance Culture: Building the Capability to Deliver a £302m Programme
Outcomes
Curzon established a holistic, integrated project configuration and control framework — giving the programme genuine visibility of project progress and project manager development for the first time. Alignment and engagement on project configuration baselines was achieved across the programme, replacing the ad hoc and unrecognised baselines that had previously made performance measurement impossible. A clear set of shared project metrics — covering cost, schedule, and risk — was created and embedded, and is now actively used for project management and performance conversations across the organisation. The programme moved from one where outputs and checklists dominated, to one focused on outcomes and delivery.
Background
The scale of the challenge was significant. Project and programme performance was poor across the board — virtually all projects were over budget and behind schedule, at a cost of millions to both the programme and the Department for Transport. Project baselines were almost non-existent, rarely agreed, and frequently ignored — making it impossible to hold performance to account or to provide meaningful assurance that the programme would deliver.
Scheme redesign was a constant occurrence but rarely recognised formally, compounding the disconnect between plans and reality. Rather than driving the programme agenda, the agency’s project managers were frequently following contractors’ priorities — a dynamic that undermined both cost control and schedule discipline.
Underlying all of this was a deeply embedded compliance culture. People across the organisation were focused on completing outputs and ticking checklists rather than driving project outcomes and performance. Process adherence had become an end in itself — insulating individuals from accountability while the programme continued to underdeliver.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began with an honest assessment of the organisation’s management capability to implement change and mobilise the workforce — recognising that technical solutions alone would not be sufficient in an environment where behaviours and culture were at the heart of the problem. A detailed analysis of project management capability gaps was conducted, mapped against both the current and future operating model, and used to prioritise where intervention would have the greatest impact.
Project lifecycle process mapping gave a clear picture of where the gaps, levers, and weak points in the system lay — providing the evidence base for a targeted, sequenced improvement plan. Critically, Curzon developed an on-the-job implementation approach that delivered immediate, visible results while simultaneously beginning to address the longer-term capability challenges. This dual-track approach was essential: the programme needed to see early progress to build confidence and momentum, while the deeper behavioural and cultural shift would take longer to embed.
Performance indicators were redesigned to align with outcomes rather than outputs — shifting the conversation from “did we complete the process?” to “did we deliver the result?” This reframing, supported by a new set of shared cost, schedule, and risk metrics, gave the project management community a fundamentally different set of incentives and a common language for performance that had previously been absent.
CASE STUDIES
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Redesigning the Engine: A New Operating Model That Delivered £20m in Savings and a 20% Service Uplift
Outcomes
Curzon delivered a comprehensive view of current ways of working across three lenses — people, process, and systems — and achieved genuine alignment among key stakeholders on both the current state and the business requirements for the future. The engagement shed light on the regulatory context and its implications, provided clear recommended options for the future operating model, and set out immediate next steps — giving the organisation the clarity and momentum it needed to move forward with confidence.
Background
A historic absence of standardisation had left the organisation with a fragmented and inconsistent approach to document management. Multiple systems and practices had evolved independently across different teams, creating siloed working patterns and a lack of cohesion that made collaboration harder than it needed to be. Critically, no one had a comprehensive view of what solutions were actually in use across the business — let alone which of them were most appropriate.
The absence of clear business requirements definitions meant that even well-intentioned improvement efforts lacked a firm foundation. And with regulatory implications around document management adding a degree of urgency, the organisation needed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.
Curzon Approach
Curzon conducted a structured gap analysis, assessing current ways of working against best-in-class practice across people, process, and systems dimensions. Stakeholder interviews were central to the approach — allowing us to surface not just the technical picture, but the lived experience of the organisation: where the real points of pain were, and where people could see opportunities that hadn’t yet been acted on.
This was complemented by analysis of key internal and external documentation, and focused desktop research into the software and data governance landscape — ensuring our recommendations were grounded in both the client’s specific context and the broader market of available solutions.
Options for future ways of working were defined and assessed against a three-layer operating model framework, covering people, process, and technology. From this, a prioritised set of recommendations was developed — giving the organisation a clear, sequenced path forward rather than an undifferentiated list of possibilities.
The result was stakeholder alignment that had previously been absent: a shared understanding of where the organisation stood, where it needed to get to, and how to get there — with the regulatory context fully integrated into the thinking.
CASE STUDIES
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Rescuing a Stalled Programme: Reframing Vision, Governance and Benefits to Get Back on Track
Outcomes
Curzon delivered a clear articulation of programme vision, governance principles, portfolio management recommendations, and a set of design principles to reframe the programme and set it up for success. A realistic and achievable benefits case was established — identifying £200 million or more in savings or cost avoidance, alongside a 1–2% improvement in operational performance. Four initiatives were identified for near-term launch, providing the early wins needed to rebuild momentum and stakeholder confidence. The engagement gave the programme the strategic clarity and executive alignment it had previously lacked.
Background
The programme had been looked at multiple times before — a history that had left a residue of scepticism and fatigue across the organisation. Overlapping workstreams reporting into different directorates created confusion about boundaries and ownership, while the programme itself lacked the clear, compelling vision needed to drive genuine engagement from the regions and functions it depended upon.
Operational improvements and financial benefits had been identified in the past but had never been realised — and without a credible financial narrative or strong executive ownership, there was little reason to believe this attempt would be different. Despite positive initial engagement, momentum had stalled and the programme was at risk of becoming another initiative that looked credible on paper but failed to land in practice.
Curzon Approach
Curzon applied a systematic review framework — examining the programme across four critical dimensions: vision, governance, approach, and benefits case. This structured lens allowed us to quickly identify where the fundamental weaknesses lay, rather than treating the symptoms in isolation.
The absence of a clear, shared vision emerged as the central issue. Without it, there was no common understanding of what the programme was trying to achieve or why it mattered — and no basis for the stakeholder buy-in that regional adoption required. Curzon worked to articulate a compelling vision and translate it into a governance structure and set of design principles that gave the programme a coherent identity and clear lines of accountability.
Testing adoption levels across the organisation and with key stakeholders gave us an honest picture of where engagement was genuine and where it was superficial — informing a realistic assessment of what the programme could credibly deliver and over what timeframe. A financial narrative was constructed and stress-tested, grounding the benefits case in numbers that the organisation could recognise and own.
The output was a reframed programme — with early wins identified, a delivery timeline validated, and executive alignment secured around a set of ambitions that were both meaningful and achievable.
CASE STUDIES
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From Four Years of Loss to €10m Profit: Turning Around a Site on the Brink
Outcomes
The turnaround delivered over €10 million in annualised operating profit and a working capital reduction of more than €20 million. The site was transformed from a business that had struggled to break even for four years into a Group-wide exemplar of best operating practices — re-establishing its position as a market-leading producer and a credible, long-term engine of growth. The transfer of capabilities to the local team ensured the improvements were sustainable well beyond Curzon’s involvement. The engagement was recognised externally, receiving a “Highly Commended” award at the MCA Awards for Change Management in the Private Sector.
Background
Four consecutive years of declining demand had left the site in a precarious position — financially, operationally, and culturally. Production teams were under significant strain, and a culture of resistance to change had taken hold, making it difficult to drive the improvements the business urgently needed. Inefficiencies were embedded across the operation, but their precise nature, location, and scale had never been properly diagnosed.
The site needed more than a short-term fix. It needed a credible transformation — one that could be demonstrated quickly enough to secure its future within the group, but delivered in a way that would last.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began with a rigorous operational analysis — establishing precisely where, why, and how greater efficiencies were achievable across the site. This diagnostic foundation ensured that the transformation effort was targeted at the interventions with the greatest impact, rather than spread thinly across the operation.
A transformation pilot was designed and managed by Curzon, with effectiveness carefully measured before committing to a wider rollout — a disciplined approach that built confidence in the changes and reduced the risk of implementation. The rollout was then prioritised and executed with robust project governance, supported by structured training to embed new ways of working across the operation.
Running alongside the operational changes was a focused effort to build leadership capability within the local management team — working with managers directly to develop the skills and confidence needed to sustain the transformation independently. This capability transfer was not an afterthought; it was central to the design of the programme from the outset, and it is what made the improvements durable rather than dependent on continued external support.
CASE STUDIES
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Building Resilience Into Growth: Giving a World-Class Airport a Common Language and a Smarter Way to Plan
Outcomes
Curzon established a single, consistent definition of resilience across the airport management organisation — replacing fragmented, department-level interpretations with a shared framework everyone could work from. Eight clear principles for assessing resilience across any airport system were defined and embedded. A practical assessment tool was developed, enabling the airport to evaluate its strategic growth options against rational, objective resilience criteria — ensuring that expansion decisions were grounded in operational reality, not just capacity projections.
Background
The airport’s existing infrastructure left little margin for error. Operating at near-full capacity, stress events — weather-induced poor visibility being among the most common — could rapidly tip the operation into chaotic, multi-system breakdown. The consequences were costly and far-reaching, and while airlines shared responsibility for delays, it was the airport that bore the reputational exposure.
The existing command-and-control model of operations management was insufficiently proactive to handle shock and stress events effectively. But beyond the operational challenge lay a strategic one: with a major expansion programme under consultation, the airport needed a rigorous, objective way to assess the resilience implications of different growth scenarios — and no such framework existed.
Across the organisation, different departments held different and often incompatible understandings of what resilience actually meant, making it impossible to have a coherent, organisation-wide conversation about how to build or measure it.
Curzon Approach
Curzon structured the engagement in two phases, recognising that meaningful progress on resilience measurement was only possible once a shared understanding of the concept itself had been established.
Phase one focused on reaching that common understanding — mapping the range of approaches to resilience that existed across the airport’s various departments, and working with stakeholders to develop a single, consistent definition that could serve as the foundation for everything that followed. This was not a semantic exercise: without alignment on what resilience meant, any attempt to measure or improve it would be undermined by competing assumptions.
Phase two translated that definition into practical tools and criteria. Curzon defined eight resilience principles applicable across any of the airport’s operational systems, providing a structured lens through which both current operations and future growth options could be assessed. A purpose-built assessment tool was then developed to enable the airport’s strategic planning teams to evaluate expansion scenarios against these principles — bringing objectivity and rigour to decisions that would otherwise have been made without a consistent framework for resilience.
CASE STUDIES
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Challenging the Outsourcing Assumption: How Independent Challenge Unlocked a Better Path Forward
Outcomes
Curzon’s independent assessment led to a fundamental reversal of the client’s planned outsourcing strategy — a recommendation accepted by management on the strength of the evidence presented. This freed up a team of internal staff who had been working on the outsourcing project for over a year, redirecting their capacity to higher-value work. Performance improvements delivered in parallel were equally significant: supplier OTIF rose to 85% against a target of 95%, demand aggregation pilots demonstrated price savings of 30–50%, lead times were compressed from 150 to 117 days with a clear roadmap to 50, and transactional costs were reduced by £1,250 per item. The quality of the work led the client to retain Curzon beyond the original engagement to continue supporting their supply chain initiatives.
Background
The supply chain operation was under pressure on multiple fronts. The improvement programme intended to address its performance issues was significantly behind schedule, eroding internal confidence in the organisation’s ability to turn things around itself. The supply base was highly fragmented and siloed, with cost inefficiencies driven by supplier proliferation and a lack of effective controls. Existing tools and capabilities were not being leveraged to their potential, and visibility of forward demand was limited.
Against this backdrop, outsourcing order and inventory management to a third-party provider had emerged as the preferred path — and a considerable amount of internal resource had already been committed to making it happen.
Curzon Approach
Curzon was brought in to make an independent assessment of the project’s status, identify the causes of delay, and develop a plan and benefit case for the recommended way forward. We conducted approximately 20 diagnostic interviews across the full breadth of the organisation — including the client-facing team, purchasing, supply chain and logistics, finance, and a representative from the largest customer site — as well as the potential outsource partner itself. This was complemented by a thorough review of existing documentation and detailed analysis of purchasing and transaction data across 11,000 part numbers and five years of historic demand.
The findings led Curzon to a conclusion that directly challenged the client’s prevailing direction of travel: given the defence context, the nature of the processes, the organisational maturity of the client, and the lack of forward demand visibility, outsourcing was not the right solution. We presented that assessment clearly and on its merits — and management accepted it.
With the outsourcing path set aside, Curzon developed an alternative set of interventions to address the underlying performance issues: improving supplier OTIF through tighter schedule adherence and lead time compression; aggregating demand to unlock contractual price breaks; rationalising the supplier base; and reducing transactional volume and cost through order aggregation and automation.
CASE STUDIES
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From Fragmented to Future-Ready: Bringing Order to a National Infrastructure Organisation's Document Management
Outcomes
Curzon delivered a comprehensive view of current ways of working across three lenses — people, process, and systems — and achieved genuine alignment among key stakeholders on both the current state and the business requirements for the future. The engagement shed light on the regulatory context and its implications, provided clear recommended options for the future operating model, and set out immediate next steps — giving the organisation the clarity and momentum it needed to move forward with confidence.
Background
A historic absence of standardisation had left the organisation with a fragmented and inconsistent approach to document management. Multiple systems and practices had evolved independently across different teams, creating siloed working patterns and a lack of cohesion that made collaboration harder than it needed to be. Critically, no one had a comprehensive view of what solutions were actually in use across the business — let alone which of them were most appropriate.
The absence of clear business requirements definitions meant that even well-intentioned improvement efforts lacked a firm foundation. And with regulatory implications around document management adding a degree of urgency, the organisation needed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.
Curzon Approach
Curzon conducted a structured gap analysis, assessing current ways of working against best-in-class practice across people, process, and systems dimensions. Stakeholder interviews were central to the approach — allowing us to surface not just the technical picture, but the lived experience of the organisation: where the real points of pain were, and where people could see opportunities that hadn’t yet been acted on.
This was complemented by analysis of key internal and external documentation, and focused desktop research into the software and data governance landscape — ensuring our recommendations were grounded in both the client’s specific context and the broader market of available solutions.
Options for future ways of working were defined and assessed against a three-layer operating model framework, covering people, process, and technology. From this, a prioritised set of recommendations was developed — giving the organisation a clear, sequenced path forward rather than an undifferentiated list of possibilities.
The result was stakeholder alignment that had previously been absent: a shared understanding of where the organisation stood, where it needed to get to, and how to get there — with the regulatory context fully integrated into the thinking.
CASE STUDIES
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Untangling the Black Box: Bringing Control and Clarity to a Fragile Costing Process
Outcomes
Within a ten-week engagement, Curzon delivered a complete end-to-end plan for costing data remediation, a clearly defined optimised target state, and a set of immediately actionable IT recommendations to establish a robust, controlled costing process. Critically, the project also surfaced and addressed a significant margin risk — identifying where sales giveaways were eroding profitability due to flawed cost calculations — and designed a solution to protect against it going forward.
Background
The business’s entire costing process had come to rest on a foundation of Excel — manual, uncontrolled, and opaque. There were no system-level safeguards, no transparency across the end-to-end process, and no single person or team with a complete picture of how costs were actually calculated. Knowledge was deeply siloed: individuals understood their own piece of the process well, but had little visibility of how it connected to the whole.
The consequences were significant. Errors and inconsistencies in the costing process were translating directly into margin erosion, with sales teams inadvertently giving away value that the business couldn’t see or quantify. The risks were real, but because the process had never been mapped end-to-end, they had never been properly understood.
Curzon Approach
Curzon moved quickly — mapping the current-state process in full within the first two weeks of a ten-week engagement. To do this effectively in an environment of siloed expertise, we deliberately sequenced our stakeholder engagement: speaking to individuals first, then bringing people together in groups, and finally convening a cross-functional workshop to ensure knowledge was surfaced, shared, and validated across the business rather than remaining locked in separate pockets.
With the as-is process fully documented, we developed a recommended target state — building on planned IT investment already in the pipeline to design an optimised, automated process that would remove the manual fragility at the heart of the current approach. We then worked up a detailed data cleanup plan, scoping the effort required to bring the underlying cost data up to the standard the new process would require.
Throughout, we kept the focus on what mattered most — in a project where unforeseen complexity surfaced regularly, disciplined triage ensured that effort was directed at the risks with the greatest commercial impact. Real product examples were used to make the problems tangible and communicable to stakeholders at every level, building the shared understanding needed to drive genuine buy-in to the recommendations.