Every engagement below is drawn from real programs led by Bharat Mistry. Clients are anonymised by agreement — the outcomes are not.
Australia's largest retail bank had been running its FX trading infrastructure on a legacy platform built in the early 2000s. Three prior replacement attempts had failed — each time running over budget, losing executive sponsorship, or stalling at system integration. The business was carrying significant operational and regulatory risk, and a fourth failed attempt was not an option.
When Bharat was brought in, the program had no single accountable delivery lead, conflicting vendor timelines, and a steering committee that had lost confidence in the program's direction.
The first 30 days were spent not on technology — but on accountability. Bharat restructured the program governance from the ground up: clear RACI, weekly steering cadence, a single source of truth for scope and risk, and vendor contracts re-baselined against realistic timelines.
The new FX platform was delivered across all three markets on the agreed timeline and within the approved budget — the first successful technology replacement of its kind for this institution in over a decade.
The governance framework put in place during the program was adopted as the institutional standard for subsequent technology programs. Three years on, the platform continues to operate without material incident.
What Bharat did in the first 30 days — just bringing clarity to who was responsible for what — was more valuable than the previous 12 months of work. The program felt completely different from that point forward.
Each prior attempt shared the same failure pattern: strong initial ambition, weak governance structure, and a collapse in accountability when the first integration issues emerged. Vendor contracts lacked clear acceptance criteria, which meant disputes over scope became the norm rather than the exception. There was no single person whose job it was to hold the whole program together.
Given the zero-downtime requirement, the cutover strategy ran as a parallel operation for 90 days — live trades processed on both legacy and new platforms simultaneously, with automated reconciliation to validate integrity. This approach added upfront complexity but removed the risk of a hard cutover that had derailed previous attempts.
The Financial Markets division had approved a landmark transformation — replacing core banking infrastructure, consolidating three legacy systems into one, and re-platforming the division's risk and reporting stack. The scale was unprecedented for the institution.
Twelve months in, the program had consumed 40% of budget and delivered less than 15% of scope. Multiple vendors, competing executive priorities, and a program structure that had grown organically without design were the core problems. The board had requested an independent review.
Bharat was engaged as Program Director following the independent review. The first phase was diagnostic: mapping actual vs planned progress, identifying the true critical path, and assessing which vendor relationships were recoverable.
Following the recovery intervention, the program delivered all primary scope items against the re-baselined plan. The consolidated platform went live across the division on schedule, and the cost overrun was contained well below initial projections at the time of recovery engagement.
The board attributed $22M in cost avoidance directly to the program restructure — savings from vendor renegotiation, avoided rework, and scope de-duplication identified during the diagnostic phase.
We had essentially written off the program as undeliverable. Bharat came in, made sense of what we had, and gave the board a credible path forward. The cost avoidance alone more than justified the engagement — many times over.
The first six weeks were spent on forensic analysis — not delivery. Bharat reviewed every vendor contract, every milestone record, every piece of documentation produced to date. The key finding: scope had been allowed to grow by approximately 35% through informal change requests that were never formally approved or costed. This alone explained most of the budget variance.
One vendor was replaced after the diagnostic confirmed their delivery was structurally blocked — not by resourcing, but by an architectural decision made 18 months earlier that was incompatible with the target state. Two remaining vendors had their contracts renegotiated: fixed-fee components converted to milestone-based payments, and penalty clauses added for critical path delays.
The client needed to double engineering capacity within 90 days to hit a regulatory compliance deadline — but couldn't hire fast enough onshore, and had no experience managing an offshore team.
Sourced, vetted and onboarded a 12-person dedicated team. Established governance, sprint cadence, and quality standards aligned to the client's existing engineering culture. Bharat remained accountable for team performance throughout.
The firm had approved a significant multi-year technology program but had no internal PMO capability and no delivery framework. Executive reporting was inconsistent and the board lacked visibility into actual program status.
Designed the PMO from scratch: governance structure, reporting templates, risk escalation framework, and vendor management process. Trained the internal team to run it independently within six months.
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