Led the operational transition from a long-standing lead technology agency to a new supplier across 18 European markets, with no interruption to live service.
→ Zero service disruption across 18 markets during transition.
Problem
Honda's European digital platform, covering Automobiles, Motorcycles, and Power across 18 markets, had been built and maintained by the same lead technology agency for a long time. That agency relationship was coming to an end, and following a robust selection process, a new supplier was appointed to take over from the incumbent and assume delivery of a live platform. The platform couldn't go dark while the handover happened. Eighteen markets meant eighteen sets of local content, local stakeholders, and local dependencies that all had to keep working through the changeover.
Context
I joined Honda as European Digital Platform Section Manager with responsibility for the platform's day-to-day operation across all 18 markets, alongside two direct reports. The supplier transition was already planned when I stepped into the role, and I became the operational lead for making it happen, the main point of contact for both the outgoing and incoming agencies, and for the internal teams whose work depended on the platform staying up.
Business objective
Honda needed the platform to keep running exactly as before, with no visible change to customers or markets, while the entire delivery capability behind it changed hands. The commercial risk of getting this wrong was high. A platform outage or a botched handover across 18 markets would have been expensive to fix and damaging to trust in the platform team.
Customer/user objective
Internal stakeholders across the 18 markets needed continuity above everything else. They didn't need to know or care which agency was doing the work behind the scenes. They needed their local sites to keep functioning, their release schedules to hold, and someone to go to if anything looked like it might slip.
Constraints
The platform was live throughout, so there was no maintenance window long enough to pause delivery while the transition happened. Two agencies had to be managed in parallel for a period, which meant duplicated coordination effort and the risk of conflicting instructions reaching the same market teams. Knowledge that had built up with the outgoing agency over a long relationship had to be captured and transferred without slowing down day-to-day releases.
Stakeholders
The outgoing agency and the incoming agency, both of whom needed clear direction and a single point of contact rather than conflicting inputs from different parts of the business. Eighteen market teams relying on continuity. My own two direct reports, who had to learn to manage relationships with both agencies at the same time as part of this transition. Senior stakeholders who needed confidence that the changeover wouldn't disrupt the business.
Research and discovery
Before the handover began in earnest, I worked through what the outgoing agency actually did day to day, beyond what was written down anywhere. A relationship that has run for a long time accumulates informal knowledge, who to call for what, which markets had particular quirks, which processes existed only as habit rather than documentation. Surfacing that before the incoming agency took over was the first job, because gaps found during the transition are far more expensive than gaps found before it.
Options considered
One option was a hard cutover, end the relationship with the outgoing agency on a fixed date and have the incoming agency take over from day one. That's faster to execute but leaves no room to catch problems, especially across 18 markets with different levels of complexity. The alternative was a phased transition, running both agencies in parallel for a period, transferring responsibility market by market or workstream by workstream rather than all at once. That takes longer and costs more in coordination, but it gives a safety net if something doesn't transfer cleanly.
Prioritisation
I chose the phased approach because the cost of a mistake was asymmetric. A short period of parallel running was manageable. An outage or a broken release across multiple markets, caused by a rushed handover, would have been much harder to recover from and would have damaged confidence in the platform team at a point where that confidence mattered most.
Delivery
I acted as the primary point of contact for all workstreams and stakeholders throughout the transition, which meant being the person both agencies came to and the person internal teams escalated to if anything looked uncertain. I led the key transition workshops, working through what needed to transfer, in what order, and who owned each piece during the handover. I kept delivery cadence going throughout, so market teams didn't experience a gap in service just because the underlying supplier was changing. I put governance frameworks in place with the incoming agency from the start, rather than letting them inherit the informal working practices that had built up with the outgoing agency over time. My two direct reports were directly involved in this, each having to manage active relationships with both the outgoing and incoming agency simultaneously as part of their own development during the period.
Decisions made
The most important decision was to run the transition in phases rather than as a single cutover, accepting a longer timeline and more coordination overhead in exchange for lower risk. I also decided to introduce new governance frameworks with the incoming agency immediately, rather than waiting until the transition settled, because it's easier to establish good habits at the start of a relationship than to fix bad ones later.
Trade-offs
Running two agencies in parallel for a period meant higher coordination cost and more of my own time spent on communication rather than other priorities. I accepted that because the alternative, a single hard cutover, carried a level of risk across 18 live markets that wasn't proportionate to the time it would have saved. Introducing new governance immediately with the incoming agency meant a slower start for them while they adjusted to a different way of working, but it avoided carrying forward habits that hadn't been questioned in years.
Business outcome
The transition completed with no days of service disruption. The incoming agency was operating with clear governance and processes in place from early in the relationship, rather than inheriting undocumented practices. The platform kept releasing on schedule throughout.
Customer outcome
Market teams across all 18 territories experienced continuity. Nobody had to manage around an outage or a missed release caused by the change of supplier. The people relying on the platform day to day didn't need to know a transition of this scale was happening behind the scenes, which was the point.
Lessons learned
A long-standing agency relationship holds more undocumented knowledge than anyone expects, and that knowledge doesn't surface until you go looking for it deliberately. Phasing a transition costs more time up front than a hard cutover, but the cost is predictable, whereas the cost of a failed cutover is not. Giving my direct reports real ownership of parts of this transition, managing both agencies at once, was uncomfortable for them at times but built capability that a slower, lower-stakes assignment wouldn't have.
What I'd improve today
I'd start documenting the outgoing agency's informal knowledge earlier, well before the transition date was confirmed, rather than treating discovery as the first phase once the transition was already underway. I'd also want a clearer, shared timeline with both agencies from day one showing exactly when each workstream would move, since some of the coordination overhead came from re-confirming handover dates as we went rather than having them fixed at the outset.
