Reducing dependence on senior pentest consultants

The board brought me in as the consultancy’s offensive security function was finding that its delivery and management practices were struggling to keep pace with growth.

The symptoms included extended delivery timelines, inefficient scheduling, inconsistent consulting behaviour and weak handovers between sales and delivery. Senior technical consultants were spending too much time resolving day-to-day client friction, reducing the capacity available for billable work.

My role was to diagnose the problems, support senior managers and directors, and help emerging managers become more effective. The consultancy retained responsibility for its management structure and daily leadership decisions throughout.

Understanding the friction between teams

I held one-to-one discussions across the offensive security, scheduling and sales teams, observed operational meetings and examined how delivery worked. Comparing those perspectives showed why people were frustrated with each other.

Testers faced context switching, unclear inputs and inconsistent demands. Sales and operational staff faced slow scoping, missing prerequisites and too little proactive communication. Both had legitimate concerns, but expectations about ownership and boundaries were not explicit enough.

Schedulers chased updates, sales stayed involved beyond the handover and senior consultants stepped in when client situations became difficult. Capable people kept work moving, but their intervention allowed the underlying gaps to persist.

Within the first month, I had reframed the main causes of friction around ownership, handover, scoping, leadership capacity and client boundaries. That gave the team a more useful starting point than treating the situation as a general failure to collaborate.

Establishing ownership without taking sides

The important judgment was to bring the different perspectives together and work through responsibility directly. I challenged the assumption that prerequisites, client updates and delivery readiness belonged to someone else. I also challenged the expectation that sales and scheduling should continually chase progress or absorb delivery problems.

Some people were protective of existing responsibilities and ways of working. Making changes required care to maintain trust, alongside enough firmness to establish clearer ownership.

The work focused on:

• Developing scoping as a consulting skill shared across the team.
• Moving responsibility for status updates and prerequisites towards the consultants delivering the work.
• Clarifying when sales should step back after handing over an engagement.
• Reducing the use of senior technical staff as the routine escalation route.
• Helping operational managers exercise the authority their roles required.

Supporting the people who would lead the change

I owned the diagnosis and the thinking behind the proposed operating model. I defined clearer expectations for consulting behaviour, scoping, client communication and ownership, and helped resolve friction between technical, sales and operational roles.

Alongside that work, I supported senior managers and directors with operational decisions and coached managers who were struggling to establish themselves in their roles. They needed the confidence and clarity to handle issues that had previously moved straight to senior consultants.

I developed my own working maturity model to describe the gaps and agree a longer-term direction. It helped make the discussion about how the team operated, rather than about individual personalities. The aim was a more explicit and repeatable approach in which responsibilities were understood and managers could act on them.

What changed over four months

By the end of the approximately four-month engagement, I observed a substantial reduction in the load carried by senior technical consultants who had previously stepped in to resolve client friction and delivery problems.

Managers were becoming more visible and effective. They took clearer ownership and handled issues that had previously escalated upwards. Consultants also had clearer expectations around client communication, engagement readiness and the boundaries of their responsibilities.

The change was visible in who handled the work: internal managers were beginning to exercise their roles more effectively, and senior technical staff were less often the automatic answer to a difficult client or delivery situation.

Continuing under internal leadership

The team retained the maturity model and consulting skills framework as tools for continued development. These were working frameworks I developed for the engagement, giving managers a way to describe progress and the next changes needed.

Further work remained to embed the behaviours consistently and develop the operating model. The engagement left the internal team with clearer responsibilities, stronger management capability and guidance to continue that work themselves.