Days 1–2: establish a shared fact base
Begin with the mandate, current commitments, commercial obligations, critical dependencies, and the decisions currently blocking the team. Interview sponsors and delivery leads separately before bringing them together. Differences in their accounts are data.
Create one visible list of facts, assumptions, and unresolved questions. This is not a forensic exercise. It is the minimum truth required to decide.
Days 3–5: stabilize the work
Identify what must continue, what can pause, and what is creating avoidable churn. Protect critical people from competing instructions. Freeze nonessential scope. Make escalation paths explicit. A recovery team earns trust by reducing noise quickly.
At this point, the goal is not a perfect new plan. It is to stop the program from accumulating additional risk while the recovery options are built.
Days 6–8: build recovery scenarios
Create two or three credible paths: recover the current target with additional capacity, reduce scope while protecting value, or reset timeline and commercial expectations. Each scenario should show consequences for cost, risk, benefit, and stakeholder commitments.
Senior leaders need choices. A single revised plan often hides assumptions and recreates the same optimism that produced the problem.
Days 9–10: reset the operating cadence
Governance should be organized around decisions, dependencies, and outcomes. Replace oversized status forums with focused working sessions and a short executive decision cadence. Assign one owner to each recovery action and make due dates visible.
The first ten days do not finish the rescue. They create the clarity, stability, and sponsorship required for the rescue to succeed.