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 looking beyond individual cost reductions and considering how the technology organization itself needed to change.
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 looked across the operating model at how we worked with vendors, how we sourced software development, and how delivery was organized and governed. If executed well, the strategy could improve the economics of technology delivery while preserving the capabilities the business needed to support the turnaround and continue modernizing the technology environment.
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 as an integrated delivery organization.
- Established an integrated delivery-governance model with clear ownership, shared delivery standards, 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 and engineering quality.
Result
The measurable difference
- Delivered more than $2.2 million in recurring annual cost savings.
- Improved development quality while increasing delivery velocity by more than 50%.
- Created a more scalable delivery model for supporting and evolving critical business applications.
- Shifted critical delivery responsibilities from external resources to internal leaders, establishing clearer ownership and accountability within the organization.
Leadership insight
Significant cost reduction does not have to come at the expense of organizational capability. When economics are treated as a design constraint rather than simply a mandate to cut, they can force better decisions about how work is organized, where accountability belongs, and how internal teams and strategic partners work together.