Crisis Response

Assume independent command within 24 hours. A senior Akholi principal is engaged and directing on the same terms for every institution, not rationed by a tier bought in advance. The commissioning board committee sets the scope in writing, not the executive whose engagement is in question. The phase delivers the board-issued charter and delegated decision rights, a no-prior-involvement declaration, the clock map that names every regulatory window the failure has started and who owns each, and the halt-and-escalate conditions. The phase takes command; it does not resolve. Nobody resolves an outsourcing failure in a day.

Establish an independent read of the situation on the institution’s own evidence, not the provider’s account. Fix what is known, by whom, and when. Map the running clocks and the immediate exposures, and name what must not fail next. Outputs: the independent situation read, the clock and exposure map, and the immediate-priority list.

Stop the operational loss and the regulatory loss at once. Outputs: the bounded-authority instruction, defining what the provider may and may not do while the account is established; the notification determinations, made and evidenced on the institution’s own timetable; the preservation and legal-hold position; and the service floor, held.

Find the real issues across the whole engagement, not the presenting symptom. Take custody of the evidence that decides the matter and build the institution’s own account of the failure, examined across its failure points: service performance against the levels promised; governance and decision rights; the transition and knowledge transfer; people and attrition; the AI and agentic components; third-party and fourth-party dependencies; and the integrity of the provider’s own reporting. On that last point, in the Akholi study of 150 outsourcing engagements the delivery staff rated their own client-facing reporting more likely manipulated, 6.3 of 10, than accurate, 4.8, so the provider’s report is treated as a subject of the diagnosis, not a source of it. Both paths are built in parallel; a choice between recovery and exit is credible only when the alternative is real. Outputs: the institution-held evidence corpus, the true-cause diagnosis, the costed recovery plan with gates, and the tested stressed exit built on data egress, transition rights, and tested runbooks.

Put a defensible verdict to the board against the charter, all three outcomes live. Hold: the engagement is sound, the failure bounded and remedied, continue on named conditions. Recover: salvageable on a costed, time-bound plan with gates and a live exit trigger. Exit: not recoverable within the institution’s tolerance, execute the tested exit. Outputs: the verdict and the resolution plan; the board-grade evidence pack, the record of who knew what and when; management’s written comments annexed, not incorporated; and the handover to whoever will execute, which is never Akholi.