The Outdoors Group is growing fast. We are building the IT function that carries it.

They came for software. We asked to talk to their staff first.

The Outdoors Group came to us because they had seen a system we had built and wanted something like it. That is usually the point where a supplier starts quoting. We took a step back instead.

The reason was in their own ambition. They had a growth plan covering the next three to five years, and an honest worry sitting underneath it: that their systems and processes were not robust enough to support that growth. Buying a piece of software would not have answered that worry. It would have added to it.

So before anything was designed, we ran focus groups with every staff team. The Outdoors Group made their people available and their people were open about where the difficulties actually were. Over the course of those conversations the same problems kept surfacing in different departments, in different words. Those patterns became the report.

A full audit, then a roadmap, then a decision

What came out of it was an operational audit with a full transformation roadmap and strategy, so the organisation could see where effort would pay and in what order. We presented it to the CEOs.

They chose to go further than the report. Nikky was engaged as Fractional CIO to oversee delivery of the strategy. That is senior IT leadership sitting inside the organisation, accountable for the programme, without the cost or the recruitment risk of a permanent chief information officer.

Governance first, systems second

The first twelve months were deliberately unglamorous. They went on internal IT governance, on compliance, and on gathering the specifications for the two systems the organisation actually needed: a new operational platform and a new learner MIS.

That order matters more than it sounds. A new system dropped into an organisation with no governance around it inherits every problem the old one had, and adds a migration on top. Getting the rules, the ownership and the specifications right first is what makes a rollout ordinary instead of dramatic.

IT also became a function in its own right, with its own team, rather than a set of responsibilities that landed on whoever happened to be nearest. For staff, that means there is now somebody to ask. For the executive, it is a visible signal that the change is real and funded.

Where it has got to

Both the operational platform and the learner MIS are on track to roll out in September 2026, earlier than originally planned. Enthusiasm and adoption from the staff teams have been high from the first day, which is not a given in a programme this size. It is largely because the people who would have to use the systems were asked about them first.