Fractional Delivery Leadership for Life Sciences Professional Services Organizations

I'm Stefan Koch.

I help growing GxP professional services organizations build the delivery discipline they need to scale without losing margin, quality, or client trust.

Most professional services leaders have seen some version of these problems:

Bad estimates and scope drift turn fixed-price engagements into losses.
Quality issues put the client relationship at risk, and the discount meant to save it wipes out the margin instead.
Your best person becomes so tied to one account that promoting or reassigning them means negotiating with the client, while multiple accounts depend on the same few senior people to step in when things go wrong.
Consultants can be fully occupied with client work while billing only around 70% of their available time - and have no capacity left to win repeat business.
Bench time drags down profitability.

As the organization grows, experienced people can't keep stepping in to catch every problem. Scope gets away from teams before anyone sees the margin impact. Quality varies by engagement. Leadership gets pulled into the same escalations again and again.

My Services

I work at three levels, depending on where the problem sits:

If you know delivery isn't working but need to understand why: Delivery System Review and Executive Advisory.

If you know delivery needs to change but need experienced leadership to make it happen: Fractional Professional Services Leadership.

If one critical client engagement needs someone to take ownership of delivery: Program Delivery Leadership.

Across all three, I use the same operating approach, which 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.

Delivery System Review and Executive Advisory

Find out what's limiting delivery and what to do about it.

Scope: Your whole delivery organization

You can usually see the symptoms: missed estimates, slipping quality, repeated escalations, an account that depends too heavily on one person. What's harder is finding the operating problem underneath while you're also running the business.

I provide an independent review of how delivery works today, including decision-making, accountability, quality integration, team structure, execution cadence, estimating, scope control, and account dynamics.

The objective is straightforward: identify what's constraining margin, quality, and predictable delivery, determine what matters most, and give leadership a practical plan for fixing it.

One example: In a growing PS organization, consultants were busy but billable utilization was only 60–70%. I traced the problem to poor visibility into time allocation, inconsistent expectations, and weak feedback loops. After putting utilization metrics and operating rhythms in place, billable utilization exceeded 90% within two months.

What you get

A clear diagnosis of the specific problems limiting margin, quality, or delivery performance
Findings prioritized by business impact so you know what to address first
Concrete recommendations with an owner and path forward: fix the issue internally, bring me in to lead the change, or address an organizational issue that needs to be resolved first

This is a short, focused engagement. You get enough clarity to make the next decision without committing to a longer-term engagement upfront.

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

Fractional Professional Services Leadership

Build a professional services organization that can grow without risking margin or reputation.

Scope: Your whole delivery organization

As a PS organization grows, weaknesses in the operating model become harder to absorb. A few senior people become bottlenecks. Scope drift erodes fixed-price margins. Quality depends too heavily on who happens to run the engagement. The same escalations keep reaching leadership. Adding people without addressing those problems can amplify them.

I've built and scaled PS organizations in regulated environments at Vineti, Körber, and Frontwell. I work alongside your existing leadership team to strengthen how delivery is structured, managed, and measured: who owns what, how engagements are estimated and managed, how quality is built into delivery, how performance is measured, and how problems are surfaced before they become escalations.

My goal is to build the operating discipline into the organization, not to create a permanent role for myself.

One example: At a fast-growing life sciences SaaS company, I established clear ownership, delivery standards, capacity planning, and quality controls across the implementation organization. Every program initiated under the new operating model went live on time, within budget, and at quality.

What you get

Clear accountability that doesn't depend on a few senior people stepping in to save engagements
Better control of estimating, scope, and delivery decisions that affect margin
Consistent delivery and quality practices across teams and accounts
Metrics that show leadership where delivery is working and where intervention is needed
Executive operating leadership without adding a full-time executive

Click here to see my past Operations Leadership experience.

Program Delivery Leadership

Experienced delivery leadership for one business-critical engagement.

Scope: One specific engagement

The program may be slipping. Scope and decisions may no longer be under control. The client may be losing confidence. Or the engagement may simply be important enough that you want experienced leadership in place before those problems develop.

I take on delivery leadership for the engagement, working directly with your team and the client. I establish clear ownership and decision-making, reset the plan where needed, integrate quality into delivery, control scope and change, and give your leadership team an accurate view of status, risk, and the decisions that need to be made.

The goal is to regain control of the engagement without creating unnecessary disruption to the team or the client relationship.

One example: A professional services firm brought me into a global MES program that was at risk of missing a critical manufacturing startup milestone. I took over delivery, reset priorities and execution cadence, and introduced automation where manual work was slowing the team down. We delivered the batch records in time for production startup and put the broader global rollout back on track.

What you get

Senior delivery leadership focused on one critical engagement
Clear ownership of scope, risks, changes, and decisions
Accurate, actionable visibility for your executive team
Earlier identification and escalation of delivery and quality risks
A structured path to stabilize delivery while protecting the client relationship

Click here to view selected Program Delivery Leadership examples.

About Me

I've spent my career building and running professional services organizations in regulated environments.

As VP of Professional Services at Vineti, Head of Projects at Körber, and EVP Americas at Frontwell, I built and scaled PS organizations delivering complex technology programs.

In one of those roles, I led a team of 15 delivering across 12 key pharma customers and exceeded revenue and efficiency targets by more than 25% in consecutive years.

Before moving into delivery leadership, I was a software engineer. That background still shapes how I work. I look for patterns, trace problems back to their source, automate where it removes unnecessary work, and use data to test whether the explanation for a delivery problem holds up.

At Vineti, I traced our biggest source of defects to inconsistent requirements handoffs. We standardized the specification format and automated user story generation. Defects were cut in half.

I lead from the front and take accountability for outcomes. I work with the leaders already in place, make ownership and decisions explicit, and protect delivery teams from competing priorities and unnecessary escalation so they can focus on the client and the work.

I know I succeeded when the teams and systems I built put me out of a job. That's why I do this work fractionally through Deliveryxcellence: you get experienced PS leadership for the period you need it, while the capability stays with your team after I leave.

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 you're seeing these problems in your delivery organization, a short conversation is usually enough to determine whether I can help.

Or schedule a call:

Schedule a free introductory call

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