Gary Sage

Senior interim Programme Director and Crisis Management specialist with years of Board and Director-level experience across 12 sectors and 27 countries. Engaged to recover distressed and failing programmes, lead critical national infrastructure delivery, and execute large-scale transformation where previous approaches have already failed. Track record of binary outcomes across every engagement.

Core expertise spans Programme Recovery, Failed Project Rescue, Crisis Management, Board-Level Transformation, PMO Transformation, Strategy Execution Office design, Cyber Transformation, Post-Merger Integration, P&L Governance, and Lean Delivery. Proven across UK, USA, Europe, Middle East, Caribbean, and Africa including simultaneous management across 19 time zones. Strong investigative skills to deliver the shortest possible ramp-up time.

I get on well with people irrespective of prevailing pressure. Strong ability to get disparate technical agendas and teams focused on the brief and generate high value outcomes. Proven, referenceable ability, to achieve accelerated delivery and reset blocked or stalled initiatives.

Independent Programme Consultant - Madison 488 / Crimson Industries

(2025-03)

Senior interim commissions across data governance, programme recovery, PMO redesign, and CNI delivery.

• Firebreak (2026). Reversed two enterprise data governance failures inside 4 weeks, guiding data modelling teams through a TOM led restructure to restore data quality and delivery confidence.
• Firebreak (2025). Pulled two failing programmes back inside 2 weeks. Introduced risk practice for AI LLM co habitation with client datasets, restoring board confidence in both cases.
• Knogin (2025). Converted a passive reporting PMO into a Strategy Execution Office for South America oil terminals and IoT surveillance across Atlantic offshore (Brazil, Guyana), interior basins (Venezuela, Colombia), and Patagonian/Andean basins (Argentina). Decision latency cut by 60%.
• BluSky (2025). Built governance and delivery infrastructure from zero for a Caribbean undersea cable upgrade, enabling scaled execution within 4 weeks.

Programme Director - Sentinel Infrastructure Group LLC

(2024-03 - 2025-03)

NG911 National Emergency Response Modernisation | USD 1.5 billion | 47 counties, 55 million people

• Coordinated Nokia, Irisity, and Motorola design partners across a 5 layer reference architecture spanning network and backbone, call routing and validation, PSAP and enrichment, command and control, and field intelligence.
• Built a vendor coordination matrix covering Intrado (managed ESInet), Carbyne (cloud native SIP fabric), Oracle OCI Sovereign Cloud, Motorola VESTA, Frequentis DIVOS, RapidSOS, ESRI ArcGIS, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and Safaricom Business SIP trunks.
• Deployed AI driven incident detection, geospatial routing, and multimedia emergency response capability, eliminating interoperability failures across the national network.
• Secured full regulatory and ministerial sign off across government, telecoms regulators, and community organisations, clearing blockers no predecessor had resolved.

Global Programme Director - Maersk (AP Moller-Maersk)

(2022-07 - 2024-03)

Network Reference Architecture and Cyber Transformation | USD 55M | 27 terminals, 14 countries, 19 time zones

• Migrated new Schneider data centres across 27 independent terminals and built the Global Recharge model that allowed terminals and Maersk to co fund deployment and procurement.
• Supervised rollout of Cisco Meraki cloud managed networking across 45 sites and standardised firewall architecture and TOMs across every terminal, with full OT/IT separation across all estates.
• Recovered a ransomware compromised terminal in 9 weeks against a 6 month board estimate, replacing all network, compute, storage, and IoT devices. Applied Theory of Constraints to identify hardware supply as the binding constraint, not engineering capacity, and ran parallel sourcing across Cisco, Schneider, and IoT vendors in front of the rebuild. One of the fastest recoveries in global logistics.
• Rebuilt the Service Management function and upgraded the Service Desk for Global Cyber Security and KTLO/BAU operations, then absorbed oil terminal operations into the same model.
• Managed Application Development, Application Support, and DevOps teams across the technical and deployment interface between Cisco design, TCS integration teams in India, terminal local engineers, and Maersk Head Office in Denmark. Mentored global network teams on terminal VLAN architecture across all 19 time zones.
• Delivered every Maersk board KPI without exception, the first time the programme had hit all board targets.

Chief Digital Strategy Advisor to CDO - SHL

(2019-07 - 2022-06)

Digital Transformation and Product Acceleration | GBP 11M | Post-PE