How trust compounds in an undefined engagement.
A shadow assignment with no defined scope produced a senior-leadership-facing diagnostic. I reached out, showed up, and did the work; the arrangement widened as findings surfaced. Working relationships extended across the CCO, the senior directors leading Scientific Services and Advanced Technologies, the Head of Marketing, and BD leadership. The senior director who hosted the engagement — unable to bring me on staff — instead joined Altigad's advisor bench.
No defined scope. No problem statement.
A shadow assignment to the Senior Director of Scientific Services. The arrangement was presence, not deliverables.
By Day 2, that frame had inverted. Access extended into every commercial meeting the senior director attended: client sentiment, sales, marketing, technical consulting, project management, contracting. By Day 3, the work had become a cross-departmental study spanning eight functions.
Structured observation across functions surfaced what siloed teams could not see.
A 92-step intake-to-delivery workflow revealed a 4.7× cascading failure effect, where small handoff losses compounded until only downstream symptoms were visible to leadership. The workflow was modeled in Excel VBA for real-time iteration.
A CCO-commissioned look into contradictory client-health signals surfaced three structural failures: ambiguous sentiment categories across teams, inconsistent operational definitions between BD, PM, and Delivery, and a broken signal path that lost context at every handoff between CRM, operations, and senior leadership.
Documentation analysis surfaced 150+ redundant distribution lists, three competing initiatives running in parallel across systems, and a single-point knowledge dependency creating an institutional-memory bottleneck.
As findings surfaced, leadership scope extended.
Was invited into the Head of Marketing's work on positioning and messaging. Opened a working conversation with the Senior Director of Advanced Technologies on emerging-technology direction and the boundary conditions for responsible AI adoption. Advocated with IT leadership for org-wide access to the internal collaboration environment — and, once trusted with it, built a living triage dashboard on top of it.
Working relationships extended across the CCO, the senior directors leading Scientific Services and Advanced Technologies, the Head of Marketing, and BD leadership — all within eight weeks. At a 375-person CRO, these are the actual decision-makers for each function. None of this scope was assigned; in each case, work was proposed and then accepted.
By Day 40, deliverables were in senior leadership's hands.
- A cross-functional triage framework defining triggers, risk thresholds, owner accountability, and escalation rules for client sentiment
- A living triage dashboard connecting CRM data to leadership signals
- An automated RACI visualization, scripted in Excel VBA, tracking accountability drift across the workflow lifecycle
- A consolidated, searchable presentation-deck library replacing 100+ scattered, non-editable PDFs
- A consolidated biomarker report compiled from internal datasets, delivered for ongoing internal use
- A 30-interviews-in-30-days stakeholder sprint reaching roughly 8% of the workforce across eight departments
- A documented current-state workflow, a phased migration plan, and eight zero-cost operational recommendations
- Org-wide collaboration-tool access approved and provisioned for all 375 employees
- 150+ redundant distribution lists documented for IT consolidation
- Three redundant initiatives identified across systems and routed for resolution
The senior director who hosted an undefined shadow engagement watched the work for eight weeks and chose to formally attach his name to the practice afterward. Unable to bring me on staff, he joined instead — Dr. Warrino now serves on Altigad's advisor bench.