Sample case study
Harbourline Services: a sample case study
Fixing the handover: how a 250-person IT services firm stopped its new services failing after go-live.
A sample case study. Harbourline is a fictional company; every name and figure is invented. Its problems are not.
The company
Three companies learning to work as one.
Harbourline Services builds, integrates and runs technology for about 60 mid-sized clients in financial services, insurance, healthcare and the public sector. It earns US$40 million a year from three lines of work:
- Managed services: running clients’ service desks, infrastructure and security.
- Systems integration: mainly Microsoft and Salesforce.
- Software development: bespoke software built for clients.
Harbourline was founded in Cork in 2008 as a software house. It bought an integration firm in Kraków in 2022 and a service-desk firm in Pune in 2023, then opened a sales and engineering office in Hartford in 2024. Today it has 250 people and 42 managers. In practice, it is three companies still learning to work as one.
The problem
Good teams, failing handovers.
In March 2025, Harbourline put a new CRM system live for Calder General, a client. Within days it was failing. The support team in Pune had been given no run-book and no monitoring, so they were working blind. The failure cost US$250,000 in service credits, and Calder General put the contract under review.
Three months later, Northlight Financial complained about repeat incidents after new services were handed over. Northlight is Harbourline’s largest client, worth 14% of its revenue. It asked for a 12-month improvement plan.
Looking back over the year, the pattern was clear:
- One new service in three had a serious incident in its first 30 days.
- It took nine weeks for a new service to settle into steady running.
- Service credits and project overruns cost US$0.9 million in 2025.
None of this was down to one team performing badly. Project teams were rewarded for hitting go-live dates. Support teams inherited whatever was handed to them. Nobody owned the gap in between.
Step 1 · Measure how the company is run
Leaders thought handovers worked. The front line knew they didn’t.
In September 2025, Harbourline appointed Ruth Adebayo as Head of Transformation. In November, she ran a baseline Business Execution Canvas Diagnostic across all 42 managers.
The weakest results were in handoffs between teams and in how quickly the company responds to change. The most telling finding was disagreement:
- Executives rated cross-team handoffs at 49 out of 100.
- Team leads, the people living with the handoffs every day, rated them at 20.
Step 2 · Understand what clients actually need
Know where you win, and where you don’t.
Priya Raman, Chief Revenue Officer, led workshops with clients and partners to set out what each client group must have and must not have. Northlight wanted service levels met every month, audit evidence on request and no surprises. Quaylight, a fast-growing fintech client, wanted weekly releases without outages.
The team then scored Harbourline against its strongest competitor, Brackenfield Technology:
- Where Harbourline was stronger: integrating with clients’ existing systems, and giving each client one point of contact who knows them.
- Where Harbourline was weaker: keeping new services calm from day one, and releasing quickly without breaking things.
Tool: Customer Value Canvas
Step 3 · Rank what to fix first
Eighteen problems, one clear priority.
Fiona Grant, Service Transition Manager, gathered 18 handover problems raised by people across Cork, Kraków, Pune and Hartford. She ranked them against four goals: calm new services, handover in four weeks, service levels met, and fewer credits and overruns.
One problem came out clearly on top: new services were handed over without an agreed run-book.
Tool: Priority Decision Matrix
Step 4 · Solve the top problem properly
Find the causes before choosing the fix.
Aoife Byrne, a team lead in Service Transition, took the top problem into an A3, with Declan Moore, Director of Managed Services, as her mentor.
The 2025 facts were stark. Of 14 go-lives, only 4 had an agreed run-book. All five serious incidents came from the other ten.
The A3 found three root causes:
- Handover was not treated as a stage of the project.
- Cork, Kraków and Pune each had their own run-book standard, or none at all.
- Projects were rewarded on go-live date, not on how the service ran afterwards.
The team tried four countermeasures:
- One run-book template: first tried on Northlight’s claims portal.
- Earlier involvement: Service Transition joins at design sign-off rather than at go-live.
- A go-live gate: no service goes live without the support team’s sign-off. This delayed one Northlight go-live by a week, and Northlight accepted the delay.
- A new bonus measure: project bonuses paid after 30 calm days. This was only partly adopted.
Tool: A3 Problem Solving
Step 5 · Change how the company works
One Harbourline.
In March 2026, Harbourline launched its “One Harbourline” operating model. It had four parts:
- One accountable owner per client, from sale to steady service.
- Written handoff agreements between every pair of teams that work together.
- A monthly leadership forum to make cross-team decisions.
- Daily coaching in Service Transition.
Ruth Adebayo recorded the model on the company’s Business Execution Canvas®, so every team could see how its work connected to the rest.
Tool: Business Execution Canvas Builder
The results
From one in three to one in eight.
Between May and August 2026, Harbourline put eight new services live. Seven had a signed-off run-book.
| Measure | Before (2025) | After (May–Aug 2026) | Target (end 2027) |
|---|---|---|---|
| New services with a serious incident in the first 30 days | 1 in 3 | 1 in 8 | 1 in 20 |
| Weeks from go-live to steady service | 9 | 6 | 4 |
The third diagnostic, in September 2026, showed the biggest improvement in exactly the areas the work had targeted: handoffs between teams, and how the teams work together.
What comes next
The pressure hasn’t gone away.
- Brackenfield is preparing a bid about 20% cheaper for Northlight’s renewal in March 2027.
- Quaylight is now releasing weekly and is testing whether Harbourline can be both fast and safe.
The latest diagnostic results are feeding a second ranking of problems. The next A3 tackles the integration knowledge that leaves with the Kraków team when a project ends.
The rest of the story
Every tool tells part of it.
Harbourline is the worked example in every Structured Collaboration tool, with the same people, teams and figures throughout. Open any of them to follow that part of the story: each tool opens on Harbourline.
- Strategy Deployment Canvas Open now →
Niamh Kearney’s 2026 strategy: nine goals turned into six objectives, each with an owner, targets and the projects behind it, including Aoife Byrne’s A3. - Structured Collaboration Canvas™ Open now →
Four teams, from bids to the Pune Service Desk, with every handoff written down and checked from both sides. One is still agreed on one side only. - Forum Decision Canvas Open now →
The monthly leadership forum’s decisions, from backing the go-live gate to refusing to match Brackenfield’s price. - Kata Storyboard Open now →
Aoife Byrne’s daily coaching with Declan Moore, following the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata described by Mike Rother: the small experiments behind the shorter handover. - Process Management Open now →
The handover mapped step by step: 45 working days before the work started, 20 in the future state. - CollabForce365 Open now →
The Service Desk in Pune, Application Support and Service Transition day to day, as they recover from two busy go-lives.
Harbourline can’t win on price or size. It has to win on handovers that work.
That is why the work started with the handover, not with a new system or a reorganisation.
Follow the story
Follow the story through the tools.
Open the Priority Decision Matrix example to see the 18 problems ranked, then select the top row to open Aoife Byrne’s A3. Every other tool opens on its own part of Harbourline’s story.