Fractional Delivery Leadership for Life Sciences Professional Services Firms

I'm Stefan Koch.

I bring operational excellence discipline to technology delivery - the infrastructure that growing GxP professional services firms need to scale without losing margin or reputation.

Most professional services leaders have seen their share of these symptoms in their organization:

Bad estimates and scope drift turn fixed-price engagements into losses.
Quality issues put your reputation at risk and the discount meant to save the relationship wipes out the margin instead.
Your best person becomes so tied to one account that promoting them means negotiating with the client, yet multiple accounts rely on the heroics of too few seniors to save the day.
Consultants fully assigned to client work bill only somewhere around 70% of their time while not winning any new business either.
Bench time is killing the bottom line.

All of these will cost you before you notice a pattern.

The infrastructure underneath most growing PS organizations hasn't kept up with headcount. Delivery becomes personality-dependent. Margin leaks in every engagement. Quality gets inconsistent because there's no repeatable system underneath it.

That's where I come in.

My Services

Every engagement runs through the same five-step approach I call CAPLO:

Clarify the real problems behind the symptoms you're seeing,

Analyze their root causes,

Prioritize by impact on margin and reputation,

Lead the change directly inside your team,

Operate the new system until it runs without me.

The three offerings below are different entry points into that same process. CAPLO describes the full arc, and each offering enters and exits at a different point. E.g. Delivery System Review covers Clarify, Analyze, and Prioritize; Program Delivery Leadership and COO as a Service carry that through to Lead and Operate.

Delivery System Review and Executive Advisory

Executive clarity on what's limiting delivery and what to do about it.

Scope: Your whole delivery organization

Most leadership teams can point to the symptoms - missed estimates, an account that depends on one person, slipping quality - but don't have the bandwidth to trace them back to the real cause.

I come in as an independent executive advisor to do exactly that: examine how delivery operates today - across leadership behaviors, decision flow, quality integration, team structure, execution cadence and account dynamics - and pinpoint the structural constraints driving the pain you're feeling. This covers the first three steps of CAPLO: Clarify, Analyze, and Prioritize.

What you get

A clear diagnosis naming the specific constraints limiting speed, quality, and margin
Findings ranked by financial and reputational impact, so you know what to fix first
Concrete recommendations for how to act on it: fix it internally with a defined owner and timeline, bring me in to lead the fix directly (Program Delivery Leadership or COO as a Service), or restructure before either

This engagement is deliberately short and outcome focused. It gives leadership a clear basis for decision-making without committing to a longer-term engagement upfront.

Click here to see examples of how I’ve identified delivery constraints and improved execution.

COO as a Service

Build the delivery infrastructure that lets you scale without risking margin or reputation.

Scope: Your whole delivery organization

Growing PS organizations eventually hit a ceiling. Delivery becomes dependent on a few seniors, every engagement leaves money on the table, and customers get frustrated by inconsistent quality. These are structural problems. Adding headcount will only make them worse until a repeatable, data driven system is established.

I've built and scaled PS organizations in regulated environments at Vineti, Körber, and Frontwell. I embed at the operating level to redesign how work moves through the organization - accountability structures, execution cadence, quality integration, and the discipline required to grow without constant escalation.

What you get

A delivery model that scales with headcount
Healthier margins through operational discipline
Consistent quality that protects client trust as you grow
COO-level leadership without the full-time cost

Click here to see my past Operations Leadership experience.

Program Delivery Leadership

Embedded leadership to stabilize your most at-risk client engagement before it costs you the relationship.

Scope: One specific engagement

Every growing services firm eventually has one: the account that's slipping, where scope drifts, the timeline becomes unrealistic, quality suffers and the customer gets more nervous every week. Left alone, these engagements can easily damage the reputation that took years to build, not to mention the margin.

I step in as embedded delivery leadership on that specific engagement: resetting the operating model and capacity plan, re-baselining scope and timeline with the client, integrating quality early, and giving your leadership team clear, data-driven and honest visibility. The goal is to turn around the engagement so it can still be a reference.

What you get

Independent delivery leadership focused entirely on getting one engagement back on track
Scope, risk, and change management that works
Clear, honest and actionable executive visibility
A path to protect the client relationship

Click here to view selected Delivery Leadership examples.

About Me

I've spent my career building delivery organizations that work.

As VP of Professional Services at Vineti, Head of Projects at Körber, and EVP Americas at Frontwell, I built and scaled PS organizations in regulated environments.

Before moving into delivery leadership, I was a software engineer. That background still shapes how I work: I think in systems, look for opportunities to automate and eliminate friction, and make decisions on signal rather than noise. At Vineti, that meant tracing our biggest source of defects back to inconsistent requirements handoffs, then templatized the spec format and automated user story generation - cutting defects in half.

I lead from the front and take accountability for outcomes. Part of that is shielding delivery teams from the organizational noise and politics so they can focus on delivering their best work.

I enjoy building systems that put me out of a job. Delivery Xcellence is where I now do that work fractionally - you get the infrastructure without the cost of a full-time executive, and I get to keep doing the work I actually enjoy.

Outside of work, I live in Massachusetts with my wife and daughter, and spend as much time as I can outdoors — mountain biking, hiking, and finding new trails.

Please visit my profile on LinkedIn for more information on my background.

If any of this sounds familiar, a short conversation is usually enough to know if there's a fit.

Or schedule a call:

Schedule a free introductory call

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