Consulting Programme Management Template
Four documents and three sheets that check every cross-workstream handoff against the providing workstream's own plan, not the receiver's assumption.
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Interlock Note · Marrow Bridge Consulting · Thoreston Industrial Supply Co. ERP replacement · 10 Feb 2027
One dependency, reconciled against its provider's own plan, not the receiver's assumption
| Chain step | Planned | Forecast | Float to 30 Apr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data cleansed | 2 Mar | 19 Mar | 42d |
| Integration testing | 23 Mar | 9 Apr | 21d |
| UAT complete | 6 Apr | 23 Apr | 7d |
| Controls sign-off | 13 Apr | 30 Apr | 0d |
| Go-live | 16 Apr | 5 May | -5d |
Data Migration's own plan showed this 17-day gap on 10 February, 20 days before Systems Integration's own plan would have discovered it on 2 March with nothing to show for it.
Fourteen days of original slack, gone, and five more borrowed, on a chain where no internal handoff carried float of its own.
Search programme management template consulting and the field has a real, settled answer. A dependency matrix shows the shape of the network, a dependency log carries a needed-by and committed-by date with an owner on each side, and a critical-path roll-up sequences the whole thing against the final date. That is genuinely good practice, and most of the leading templates in the category ship some version of all three. What none of them checks is where the committed-by date in that log actually comes from.
Read closely, the owner named on the providing side is usually whoever answered the request, not someone with visibility into that workstream's real schedule. The committed-by date next to their name is therefore often just the receiving workstream's own hope, typed into a column that looks like verification. This pack's register reads that date somewhere else: the providing workstream's own, independently maintained task register, for the specific task that produces the thing. Both numbers already exist in two documents. Nobody had opened them side by side.
Marrow Bridge Consulting's ERP programme for Thoreston Industrial Supply Co. sequences four workstreams against one date that cannot move: the legacy platform's vendor support expires 30 April 2027, after which, as NIST's own patch-management guide puts it, a fix "will never be released because the software is at end-of-life." On 10 February, Data Migration's own plan showed its data-cleansing task landing 17 days after Systems Integration's own plan had assumed, caught 20 days before that gap would otherwise have surfaced on its own.
What's in the pack
Programme Charter
Names the four workstreams and their owners, and the one external date, a vendor's end of support, the whole sequence is planned against.
Cross-workstream Dependency Register
Every handoff between workstreams, with the receiver's assumed date and the provider's own committed date sourced into the same row.
Milestone Interlock
The same network laid out as a sequence, showing what each workstream's milestone feeds into next, and its current status.
Critical Path
Float remaining to the hard deadline at every step, so a slip's real cost is visible before it reaches the final date.
Dependency Network Map
Which of the network's edges actually sit on the path to go-live, and which only matter inside one workstream's own schedule.
Interlock Note
The written brief a broken dependency produces: the finding, the cascade in days, and what the reconciliation bought in warning time.
Escalation Procedure
What happens the moment a dependency is found broken, and the two thresholds that send it to the steering committee rather than the next review.
How it works
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Edit with AI installs the pack as a private Space and starts the reconciliation. Download gives you the Word documents and CSV sheets free, no account.
- 2
Send every workstream's own plan
Not a rolled-up programme summary: each workstream's actual task register, so a provider's real committed date can be read from it directly.
- 3
Get both dates in the same row
The receiver's assumption and the provider's own commitment, side by side, so a gap is visible the moment it exists rather than the day it comes due.
- 4
Trace anything broken to the deadline
A variance gets carried step by step to the programme's actual external date, with the float remaining stated in days at every stage.
Frequently asked questions
Is this programme management template free?
Yes. Download gives you the whole pack with no account and no email: four Word documents and three CSV sheets. Edit with AI creates a free account, installs the same pack as a private Space, and reconciles your own workstreams' plans against each other.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word (.docx) for the four documents and CSV (.csv) for the three sheets, zipped together. Everything opens natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets. Add ?format=pdf to the download URL for the documents as PDFs.
How is this different from a standard dependency log or RAID log?
Most dependency logs name an owner on each side and a committed-by date, then trust whoever filled the row in. This pack's committed-by date is read directly from the providing workstream's own task register for the specific task involved, never typed in by the receiving side or a coordinator confirming a conversation happened.
What counts as a dependency being Broken versus At Risk?
Broken means the providing workstream's own plan, sourced directly, shows a later date than the receiving workstream assumed: a root cause. At Risk means a milestone's own forecast moved because something upstream of it broke, even though its own workstream did nothing wrong. The distinction decides who owns fixing it.
How is this different from the consulting workplan and resource tracker?
That pack tracks one workstream's own tasks against its own fee. This one starts where a single workstream's visibility ends: the handoffs between workstreams, where one side's plan can look fine in isolation while quietly disagreeing with what another workstream assumes about it.
Does this replace the steering committee's decision queue?
No. That pack runs the recurring meeting where a programme-level decision actually gets made. This one is what feeds it a finding worth deciding: a broken dependency, traced to its cost in days against the real deadline, with a specific ask attached rather than a status update.
Find the handoff nobody cross-checked
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or send River every workstream's own plan and get the reconciled register back.
Edit with AI