Providing strategic leadership for large-scale analysis workstreams, coordinating cross-functional teams, and ensuring alignment between business objectives and technology delivery across complex global programmes.
Case StudiesThese engagements illustrate how our Lead Analysts provide the strategic direction, team leadership, and stakeholder alignment that complex global programmes require.
BP's Integrated Supply and Trading (IST) division embarked on a major programme to replace its legacy trading and risk management platform with a modern, cloud-native solution capable of supporting trading across crude oil, refined products, natural gas, and power markets. The programme required a large analysis team to work in parallel across multiple trading desks, each with distinct workflows, regulatory obligations, and risk management requirements.
Our Lead Analyst was appointed to manage the entire analysis workstream, comprising 20 analysts distributed across BP's London, Houston, and Singapore offices. The role encompassed defining the analysis methodology, establishing documentation standards, allocating analysts to workstreams, and conducting quality reviews of all deliverables before submission to the solution design team. The Lead Analyst also served as the primary point of contact between the business stakeholders and the technology delivery organisation, attending daily stand-ups with each trading desk and weekly steering committees with senior management.
One of the most significant challenges was managing dependencies between workstreams. Changes to requirements in the crude oil trading desk frequently had implications for the refined products desk, and vice versa. The Lead Analyst implemented a cross-workstream impact assessment process, holding twice-weekly coordination sessions to identify and resolve conflicts early. This approach reduced requirements rework by 45% compared to the previous phase of the programme, which had operated without centralised analysis leadership.
The Lead Analyst also established a competency development programme for junior analysts on the team, providing mentoring, conducting regular one-to-one reviews, and organising knowledge-sharing sessions on topics including commodity trading workflows, regulatory frameworks, and requirements engineering best practices.
Dyson was developing the next generation of its connected home ecosystem, enabling its range of purifiers, vacuums, and hair care devices to share data, learn user preferences, and provide proactive maintenance recommendations. The programme involved hardware engineering, embedded software, cloud platform development, and mobile application teams working in parallel across the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Philippines.
Our Lead Analyst was brought in to establish and operate the programme governance framework for the analysis workstream. This involved defining how requirements would flow from product management through analysis into design and development, establishing quality gates at each stage, and implementing a change control process that could accommodate the rapid pace of product innovation whilst maintaining architectural coherence across the platform.
The Lead Analyst facilitated quarterly programme increment planning sessions, bringing together over 80 participants from all disciplines to align on priorities, identify risks, and commit to delivery objectives. Between these events, the analyst maintained the programme-level requirements backlog, managed inter-team dependencies, and produced fortnightly status reports for the executive leadership team. A particular focus was ensuring that the user experience remained consistent across all product lines, requiring close coordination between the individual product analysis teams and the central platform team.
Aramco Trading Company (ATC), the trading arm of Saudi Aramco, required a new commodity trading and risk management system to support its expanding operations across crude oil, refined products, chemicals, and LNG. The programme involved multiple technology vendors, internal IT teams, and business units across Dhahran, London, and Singapore.
Our Lead Analyst was responsible for coordinating the analysis effort across all commodity desks and ensuring that the chosen platform was configured to support ATC's specific trading workflows, risk management policies, and regulatory reporting obligations. This required working closely with traders, risk managers, operations staff, compliance officers, and IT architects to build a holistic picture of requirements.
The Lead Analyst developed a structured approach to managing the complexity, creating a requirements taxonomy that organised over 1,800 individual requirements into logical groupings aligned with the trading lifecycle. This taxonomy enabled impact analysis when requirements changed, supported prioritisation discussions with business stakeholders, and provided the basis for test planning. The analyst also led the vendor evaluation process for the CTRM platform selection, producing a detailed scoring framework and coordinating proof-of-concept demonstrations with three shortlisted vendors.
BP's global finance transformation programme aimed to standardise financial processes and reporting across six business units: upstream, downstream, trading, shipping, renewables, and corporate functions. Each business unit had distinct requirements, legacy systems, and organisational cultures, creating significant challenges for alignment and consensus-building.
Our Lead Analyst was tasked with managing stakeholder engagement across all six business units, ensuring that each unit's requirements were captured, that trade-offs between standardisation and local flexibility were explicitly discussed and resolved, and that all stakeholders maintained confidence in the programme's direction. The analyst established a stakeholder engagement framework comprising regular one-to-one sessions with business unit leads, monthly cross-unit forums for discussing shared requirements, and quarterly town halls for broader communication.
A critical aspect of the role was mediating between business units with conflicting requirements. For example, the upstream division required project-based cost accounting with detailed work breakdown structures, whilst the trading division needed real-time profit and loss reporting by trading book. The Lead Analyst facilitated a series of design workshops that identified a configuration approach capable of supporting both models within the target SAP platform, avoiding the need for costly custom development. The stakeholder management approach developed during this engagement was subsequently adopted as the standard template for future BP transformation programmes.
Dyson's engineering division initiated a digital programme to modernise its product development lifecycle, replacing fragmented tools with an integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) platform. The programme affected over 3,000 engineers across mechanical design, electronics, software, and manufacturing engineering disciplines, each with specific toolchain requirements and established ways of working.
Our Lead Analyst was responsible for leading the analysis workstream, which required deep engagement with each engineering discipline to understand their current processes, pain points, and requirements for the new platform. The analyst managed a team of eight analysts, each embedded within a different engineering discipline, and was responsible for synthesising their findings into a coherent set of requirements that could be addressed by a single platform solution.
The most challenging aspect was defining the requirements for cross-discipline collaboration, which was where the greatest potential value lay but also where existing processes were least formalised. The Lead Analyst organised a series of cross-discipline workshops that brought together engineers from different teams to map their collaboration patterns, identify bottlenecks, and define requirements for improved ways of working. These workshops revealed significant opportunities for efficiency improvements, particularly in the handover between mechanical design and manufacturing engineering, where rework rates were reduced by 35% following the platform implementation.
Our Lead Analyst consultants combine deep analytical expertise with proven leadership skills to drive large-scale programmes to successful outcomes.
Establishing and operating governance frameworks that provide oversight, quality assurance, and decision-making structures for complex programmes. We define quality gates, change control processes, and reporting cadences that keep programmes on track whilst remaining responsive to evolving business needs.
Building, mentoring, and managing high-performing analyst teams across multiple locations and time zones. We establish working standards, conduct quality reviews, provide career development support, and create environments where analysts can deliver their best work on challenging enterprise programmes.
Engaging effectively with stakeholders at all levels, from C-suite executives to operational staff, to ensure alignment, manage expectations, and build the consensus needed for successful programme delivery. We design and operate engagement frameworks that maintain trust and transparency throughout the programme lifecycle.
Coordinating analysis activities across multiple business functions, technology domains, and geographical locations. We manage dependencies, resolve conflicts, and ensure that the overall solution meets the needs of all stakeholders whilst maintaining architectural coherence and avoiding unnecessary complexity.
Producing rigorous business cases that articulate the strategic rationale, financial justification, and expected benefits of proposed investments. We quantify costs and benefits, assess risks, model alternative scenarios, and present findings in formats that enable confident decision-making by senior leadership.
Leading structured vendor evaluation processes that ensure objective, evidence-based selection of technology platforms and delivery partners. We develop scoring frameworks, coordinate demonstrations and proof-of-concept activities, and produce recommendations that balance functional fit, cost, risk, and strategic alignment.
Our Lead Analysts bring the strategic vision, team management expertise, and stakeholder engagement skills that complex global programmes demand. Let us help you drive your next initiative to success.
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