Situation
The business context
A large restaurant company was undertaking a significant enterprise restructuring following several years of declining sales, earnings, and guest traffic, which placed increasing pressure on operating margins. As part of the broader turnaround strategy, leadership established a mandate to reduce G&A expenses while protecting the capabilities necessary to stabilize the business and return it to sustainable growth.
Task
The leadership mandate
As a senior IT leader, I was responsible for translating this enterprise mandate into an actionable technology strategy. My challenge was to materially reduce the IT cost structure without simply cutting capacity or compromising our ability to execute critical business initiatives. This required rethinking our vendor portfolio, software development sourcing model, and how we organized technology delivery.
Strategy
The strategic approach
My strategy was to treat the G&A mandate as an operating-model transformation rather than a cost-cutting exercise. The goal was to lower structural cost while preserving and ultimately increasing the organization’s capacity to deliver. I focused on four connected levers: vendor concentration and commercial agreements, the software-development sourcing model, delivery governance, and organizational accountability. Together, these changes would improve the economics of technology delivery while protecting the capabilities required for the company’s turnaround and future modernization agenda.
Action
How the work moved forward
I led my leadership team through a targeted transformation of our IT operating model, aligning each initiative to the company's G&A reduction and turnaround objectives.
- Restructured strategic vendor relationships, challenging existing commercial models, consolidating spend, and renegotiating agreements based on the company's changing requirements.
- Transformed the software development sourcing model, shifting work to a strategically selected offshore partner and redesigning how internal teams and external engineering resources worked together.
- Established an integrated delivery-governance model with clear ownership, performance expectations, and accountability across internal leaders and the strategic partner, ensuring the new sourcing model operated as one delivery organization rather than simply as labor arbitrage.
- Led the organization through the change by clearly connecting the transformation to the broader business imperative, while maintaining focus on delivery continuity, engineering quality, and the capabilities required to support future growth.
Result
The measurable difference
- Delivered more than $2.25 million in recurring annual cost savings.
- Improved development quality and delivery velocity by more than 50%.
- Created a more scalable operating model for continued modernization.
- Demonstrated how technology leadership could translate an enterprise turnaround objective into operational change.
Leadership insight
Significant cost reduction does not have to come at the expense of organizational capability. With clear outcomes, strong accountability, and deliberate change leadership, we were able to create more strategic capacity from every technology dollar.