A 500-person Berkshire Hathaway portfolio company in the enterprise media and regulatory disclosure space had a technology organization spanning Engineering, Infrastructure/SRE, Information Security, Product Management, and Corporate IT that had accumulated years of structural dysfunction. Critical projects had been in development for up to seven years without shipping. Production incidents were frequent. Security posture was weak, with recurring audit findings. Costs were poorly controlled. Leadership had lost confidence in the technology team's ability to deliver.

An independent diagnostic identified four root causes driving the dysfunction:

• Engineering talent insufficient in seniority and technical depth, with an underqualified management layer unable to drive accountability or quality
• Absence of enterprise architecture discipline, leaving teams without technical direction or coherent system design
• An InfoSec team too disorganized and understaffed to manage compliance obligations or reduce risk effectively
• Deep departmental siloing preventing coordination across functions and creating duplicated effort and misaligned priorities

Rather than addressing symptoms, the engagement restructured the organization around the root causes. The engineering department was rebuilt around principal-level technical leads embedded in each team. A structured job matrix was introduced to give managers a consistent tool for evaluating skill levels, performance, and career progression. A formal talent review process, including calibrated 9-box evaluations, was instituted to create accountability and visibility at the leadership level. Underperforming managers and engineers were transitioned out with care and clarity. The software development lifecycle was redesigned to establish shared standards for quality and delivery across teams.

The outcomes required more than accurate diagnosis. Restructuring a management team, replacing underperforming personnel, and changing how an organization measures itself generates significant internal friction. Maintaining trust with senior leadership while delivering difficult assessments — and maintaining working relationships with the team being restructured — required sustained stakeholder navigation throughout the engagement. The recommendations were only as valuable as the organization's willingness to act on them, and that willingness had to be earned and maintained over time.

A PE-backed enterprise software company had accumulated years of structural dysfunction in its IT procurement function. The problems were not the result of any single decision — they were the compounded outcome of procurement made in isolation, without architectural oversight, without utilization accountability, and without a structured process for ongoing review. The cost was significant and growing.

Four patterns of waste were driving the overspend:

• Gross capability mismatch. Enterprise-grade data pipeline software designed to process up to one million transactions per day had been purchased for an operation running approximately 2,000 transactions per day. The product was catastrophically over-specified for the actual workload — and priced accordingly.
• Purchases without implementation resources. A second enterprise platform had been acquired without budgeting the full-time engineering resource required to develop and maintain it. The product was being used at approximately 5% of its capacity — a near-total waste of the license investment.
• Accumulated shelfware. Multiple software products acquired by managers who had since departed the company were being renewed annually by procurement — because no one could confirm with certainty that they were no longer needed. Absence of documentation had created a renewal default that no one challenged.
• Out-of-support software with custom support fees. Several deployments were running on end-of-life versions, requiring expensive custom support agreements with vendors. The assumption that upgrading would be a major undertaking was incorrect — modern equivalent offerings could be deployed within one to two months — but that assumption had never been tested.

The root cause underlying all four patterns was the same: procurement had no structured process for auditing IT spend, no reliable communication channel with engineering and IT managers, and no mechanism for surfacing issues with sufficient lead time to act before contract renewals. Problems were occasionally raised — but always too late to change course. The dysfunction was systemic, not incidental.

The engagement began with a comprehensive audit of all vendor contracts and a full inventory of software licenses against actual utilization data. For each identified issue, a specific and actionable proposal was developed: cancellation of confirmed shelfware, replacement of over-specified platforms with right-sized alternatives, substitution of out-of-support products with modern equivalents, and license count rationalization aligned to actual usage.

Recommendations were then worked through directly with IT department leaders — not presented and handed off. Each approved action was planned and executed as a discrete project with clear ownership and timelines. In parallel, a structured procurement review process was established: a formal license audit cadence, clear communication protocols between procurement and engineering managers, and renewal calendars with sufficient lead time to evaluate, negotiate, or exit contracts before auto-renewal locked in another year of unnecessary spend.

The savings were real, but the more durable outcome was structural. Organizations that fix procurement problems without fixing the process that created them will reproduce the same waste within two or three renewal cycles. Establishing a reliable audit cadence and a functioning communication channel between procurement and technical leadership meant the company was positioned to maintain the gains — not just capture a one-time reduction and drift back toward the same patterns.