Evaluated a single-agency delivery model against the risks it carried, and built the evidence-based case that took a federated development approach to senior leadership.
→ Strategic agency recommendation delivered to senior leadership. Federated development framework defined as the preferred option.
Problem
The platform relied on a single lead technology agency for all development work, creating a dependency risk with no alternative if the relationship broke down.
Context
This ran alongside the wider Fortescue delivery rebuild, where I was already managing the agency relationship day to day and had a close view of its strengths and limits.
Business objective
Assess, on the evidence, whether a federated development approach involving more than one agency would serve the business better over the long term than the existing single-agency model.
Customer/user objective
Senior leadership needed a genuinely comparative view they could act on, not a single opinion presented as the only answer.
Constraints
The evaluation had to be based on the existing contracts, scopes, and performance data already available, since there was no budget or time to run a parallel pilot with a second agency before recommending a direction.
Stakeholders
Senior Fortescue leadership who would decide the future model, and the existing lead technology agency, whose current contract and performance formed the baseline for the comparison.
Research and discovery
I reviewed the existing agency contracts, scopes of work, and performance data to understand what the current model actually delivered, not just what it was meant to deliver on paper.
Options considered
I mapped the risks and benefits of staying with a single agency against those of moving to a federated model, working through where each approach would help and where it would introduce new complexity, drawing directly on my own experience managing agency relationships elsewhere on the platform.
Prioritisation
Getting an accurate picture of current performance came first, since a comparison against an inflated or understated baseline would have produced a recommendation nobody could trust.
Delivery
I produced a structured recommendation setting out three options, each with its own rationale and proposed next steps, so senior leadership had a clear basis for a decision rather than a single opinion presented as the only answer.
Decisions made
I decided to present three options rather than a single recommendation, so leadership could weigh the trade-offs themselves rather than simply approving or rejecting my preferred answer.
Trade-offs
A federated model reduces single-agency dependency risk but adds coordination overhead across multiple relationships. I set that trade-off out explicitly rather than picking a winner and understating the cost.
Business outcome
The recommendation gave senior leadership a clear, evidence-based basis for deciding the future agency model.
Customer outcome
Leadership could weigh three clearly defined options against each other, rather than deciding on incomplete information.
Lessons learned
A strategic recommendation lands better with three weighted options than one preferred answer, since it gives leadership ownership of the final call rather than asking them to simply approve a conclusion.
What I'd improve today
I would build a lightweight pilot into the recommendation itself, so the federated option could be tested on a small piece of work before committing to it at scale.
