Strengthening Delivery Capability for Defence SME Contractors

The company was good at the work and losing margin on it. Demand was growing across government and MOD-aligned programmes, and every project was still being run as though it were the first one.

There was no standard contract, no consistent way of flowing obligations down to subcontractors, and no agreed definition of done. Risk sat wherever the last negotiation had left it.

We rebuilt the commercial layer first: framework agreements at the top, flow-down terms for subcontractors, and statements of work that had to be scoped and signed before anyone started delivering.

Then the delivery layer. Onboarding, milestone reporting, acceptance criteria and change control were written down once and applied everywhere, so a new programme starts from a known position rather than a blank page.

Milestone billing followed, which fixed the cash flow problem that growth had been quietly making worse.

The company can now take on contracts and suppliers without adding risk each time: prime-contractor discipline, at the speed of a small business.