The situation
A retailer under private equity ownership, with an HR function whose technology was failing in the way that costs the most and gets escalated the least: payroll incidents. Not a catastrophic outage, but a steady rate of P1 and P2 issues affecting pay, absorbing senior attention, and eroding trust in the function faster than any single failure would have.
There was no business technology organisation supporting HR. There were people doing the work, capably, without the structure that would let them do it reliably.
The work
This was an interim line role rather than an advisory one. The remit was to build and scale a business technology organisation inside HR, and to establish the operational mechanisms it had never had.
The first move was diagnostic and unglamorous: work out which incidents were technical, which were process, and which were the absence of a defined owner. Most were the third. Establishing ITIL 4 based mechanisms for HR IT operations — incident, problem and change management, with real ownership attached — resolved a class of failures that no amount of technical remediation would have touched.
The second was building the team and the capability. Private equity environments reward speed, and the fastest route to a lower incident count is usually to centralise decisions in one competent person. That works until they leave. The structure built here was designed to be handed over.
What changed
HR technology delivery quality improved by fifty per cent. Critical payroll-impacting incidents fell by ninety per cent. The organisation ended the engagement with a function it had not had at the start, run by its own people.
The fifth measure
A PE-owned business will always take the fast fix over the durable one if it is not made to choose deliberately. The measure that mattered here was not the incident count on the day of handover. It was whether the incident count held six months later, without me.