Building digital capability in the team you already have
Structured work with the people who run your digital day to day, so the organisation gets better at deciding, commissioning and improving its own digital operation. Usually this runs alongside a wider engagement rather than instead of one.
Book a free 30-minute conversationThe problem this addresses
Plenty of organisations have bought good digital advice and still cannot act on it. The report is sound, the direction is agreed, and then it stalls because the people expected to carry it have never been given the grounding to do so.
It shows up in small, recognisable ways. Nobody can tell whether an agency's proposal is reasonable. A tool is bought on a demo and abandoned within a year. The person who understood the analytics has left, and the reporting quietly stopped meaning anything. None of this is incompetence. It is a capability that was never deliberately built, in people who were hired to do something else.
The consequence is dependency. Every digital decision has to be outsourced, which is slow and expensive, and the organisation never gets better at making them.
What it is
Regular structured sessions with the people who own digital inside your organisation, built around the decisions actually in front of them rather than a generic curriculum.
In practice that means working through the real things: a live supplier proposal, the analytics nobody trusts, a process that eats a day a week, the AI tool someone wants to introduce. The work is the training. People learn to judge digital decisions by making them with someone experienced in the room, which is the only way I have seen it stick.
The measure of success is that you need less of me, not more.
This is capability building, not leadership. I am not accountable for your roadmap and I do not direct your suppliers. Where an organisation needs someone who does carry that accountability, capability development usually runs alongside fractional digital leadership rather than standing in for it.
Capability development
The point at which you stop needing outside help
Most organisations do not have a skills problem. They have a dependency problem. Decisions wait for someone external, and the knowledge leaves when the invoice is paid. This is the work of making sure that stops.
What it addresses
- A leadership team that cannot interrogate a digital or AI proposal without help
- One internal person who has become the single point of failure
- Suppliers who are trusted because nobody internally can check them
- Decisions deferred because nobody feels qualified to make them
How it runs
- Working sessions with the people who actually decide, not classroom training
- Built on your live decisions and your own documents, never generic case studies
- Between two and six sessions, spaced to let practice happen in between
- A short written record after each one, so the knowledge outlives the session
The measure is not satisfaction scores. It is whether the next digital decision gets made internally, on time, without me in the room.
Scoped by how many people need to be able to do this and how contested the decisions are. Usually the smallest engagement in the business.
What you get
- Regular sessions with the two or three people who own digital, built on live decisions
- The ability to read a supplier proposal and say what is missing from it
- Reporting your team understands and can defend, rather than a dashboard nobody reads
- Practical grounding in where AI tools help and where they create risk
- A written record of what was covered, so the capability survives someone leaving
- An honest view of where you still need outside help, and where you no longer do
How this is scoped
This is bought by the month or by the block, and it should have an end in view from the start.
What sets the size
How many people are involved, how far they are starting from, and whether there is a live programme to hang the work on. Two people with a real decision in front of them progress faster than a larger group with none.
A typical shape
A session every two to four weeks of 60 to 90 minutes, with the same small group, over six to twelve months. Enough time to work through a full cycle of decisions, and short enough that it does not become a standing cost.
What the first conversation establishes
Thirty minutes, free, on who is expected to own digital and what they are missing. If the honest answer is that nobody owns it at all, no amount of capability work will fix that and I will say so.
How a proposal follows
A short written scope: who attends, how often, what is covered, the fee and the point at which it should end. Reviewed at three months. It is meant to work itself out of a job.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
This is for you if
- Someone internally owns digital but has never been given the grounding for it
- Every digital decision currently has to be outsourced to be made at all
- You have a strategy or a review sitting there that nobody has been able to act on
- You want to reduce dependency on outside help rather than deepen it
This is not for you if
- Nobody in the organisation owns digital, in which case you need leadership first
- You want general business coaching, which is not what this is
- You want certified training against a syllabus rather than work on live decisions
- The people involved have no authority to act on what they learn
Independence
No software to sell
I do not own, licence or resell a product, so the tools your team learns to judge are judged on their merits.
No reseller agreements
No partner tiers, no referral fees, no vendor relationships that need feeding.
A named end point
The work is designed to stop. An arrangement that quietly becomes permanent has failed at the thing it was for.
Evidence
Capability built, in organisations of very different sizes.
Track record
Support for more than 140 SMEs through DigitalCity
More than forty years in business and technology, more than thirty of them in digital, much of it spent explaining technical decisions to the people who have to live with them.
About »Sector experience
Documented engagements across legal, financial services, property, travel, health and charity
Every one written up with what was done, what changed and what did not.
All case studies »What happens next
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