Senior architect leads. Team Charlie delivers.
19% of all IT projects fail outright, 50% go off the rails. For programs over €10M, the success rate drops below 10% (Standish CHAOS). Three ways in before your project becomes a statistic: co-lead with your team, lead alone, or orderly stop. Focus areas: Spryker, SAP Commerce, commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Standish CHAOS distribution across IT projects: 31% successful, 50% challenged, 19% failed. What rarely gets communicated: at project volumes over €10M the success rate tips below 10% — ten times the cancel rate of small projects. That's exactly where we get called.
Projects under €1M deliver in the majority — small team, clear scope, short time horizon, low political complexity.
Source: Standish Group · CHAOS ReportIn the classic mid-market project range, only one third hits the target. 50% go off the rails, 19% fail outright. Cancel risk real, cost overruns the norm, scope reductions the rule — exactly where mid-market programs typically sit.
Source: Standish Group · CHAOS ReportAt volumes over €10M, fewer than one in ten projects reaches its goal — ten times the cancel rate of small projects. This is our territory.
Source: Standish Group · CHAOS Report · McKinseyAnyone starting a €10M program is calculating with 90% probability of cancel, cost overrun, or scope reduction. That's exactly the starting point we get called into.
In the first phase of a rescue mandate, we look across six axes: architecture, code, vendor, team, sponsor, delivery plan. In most mandates we find the actual break on at least four of them. Here are the recurring patterns.
Requirements grow, stop conditions are missing
Platform doesn't fit B2B reality
Point-to-point spaghetti instead of a hub
Key engineer already half-checked out
Original champion has been replaced
Traffic lights green, delivery red
In eight out of ten mandates, the first finding is not "the platform is wrong" — it's "governance has lost the ground", and has been doing so long before anyone officially says so. Every fracture pushes OpEx over plan — procurement usually notices only in the delivery report, once the cash is already spent.
After the triage we deliver an assessment with three levels — each with clear criteria and a clear course of action. No "traffic light" theater — decision-ready language for the steering committee.
Delivery cadence lost, trust between sponsor and team strained, but the foundation holds. Platform choice is sound, architecture is healthy at the core. We go in as co-lead with Team Charlie — reorder the backlog and delivery cadence, close the trust gap.
Multiple breaking points simultaneously: architecture debt, key departures, vendor conflict. The steering committee doesn't yet know how serious it is. We take operational lead, escalate honestly to C-level, make hard scope decisions.
Rare, but it happens: a combination of vendor dead-end, organizational break, and economic reality makes continuation pointless. We recommend an orderly wind-down over a façade of continuation.
Level 03 rarely applies — when it does: sunk cost is sunk. The next €5M won't save the plan. Honest damage containment beats a façade of continuation every time.
Senior architect leads. Four to fourteen specialists join as needed — architecture, engineering, project lead, AI workflow. No junior pyramid, no bench. Whoever shows up has delivered this multiple times.
Team Charlie in detailThree voices from three different rescue constellations — a Spryker upgrade emergency, a complex multi-stakeholder landscape, four years of senior sparring building a delivery organization. Each with a different break, each with a different solution.
"Our lifeline on problems where every other developer had failed — at our side whenever it got tight." — Jan Sterl, Software Architect
Spryker platform upgrade in a stalled setup. Standard dev teams had given up. Pragmatic problem solving, cost-effective handover to the internal org.
"Technical depth combined with strategic perspective. Navigation through complex system landscapes and different teams." — Martin Kousek
Complex eCommerce program with multiple partner agencies, internal teams, and vendor relationships. Architecture depth and stakeholder navigation in one mandate — without team politics.
"Trust at every level of an organization — from the dev team to C-level. Calm, reliable, solution-focused." — Karsten Krause-Ablaß, TOWA
Four years of senior sparring building and scaling a Spryker practice. Bridge between engineering reality and board communication — exactly the bridging capability that makes the difference in rescue mandates.
We build with you, not for you. Engagements are workbenches, not theatre. Delivery in short loops. Clean handover, then your team carries it alone.
Method in detail
25 years in IT, 14 of them in B2B commerce. Architecture mandates with large enterprises, building and steering distributed expert teams, vendor-neutral project rescue. Focus areas: platform architecture, project rescue, team operations.
Chris Zepernick
We sit next to your team, not in front of it. After the mandate, your org carries it alone — we make ourselves redundant. Anyone who creates dependency hasn't understood the job.
How we workCall directly. We listen first, then tell you whether and how we can help.
