about us
20+ Years. 200+ Projects.
One Pattern, Every Single Time.
The person behind the SPARK Method™ — and why the framework only exists because the problem kept repeating itself.
20+ Years Onsite Crisis Recovery
200+ IT Projects Across Industries
PhD – Project Management & Organisational Behaviour
10 IT Project Killers Named and Documented
I spent 20 years being called in after the damage was done.
The call always comes the same way. The project is behind. The steering committee is losing confidence. Management has already tried two or three things that did not work.
And now somebody has decided that what is needed is someone from the outside who can come in and see what everyone else has stopped seeing.
I have been that person for more than 20 years. Different industries. Different companies. Different technologies. And the same ten patterns, appearing again and again, destroying projects that should have survived.
For a long time, I accepted that this was simply how it went. Projects get into trouble. You come in, diagnose it, and fix what can still be fixed. That was the work.
But at some point — after enough assignments, enough steering committees, enough project teams with no gleam left in their eyes — the question changed. It was no longer “how do I fix this one?” It became: “why does nobody see this coming?”
The answer, every time, was the same. Not incompetence. Not bad luck. Not the technology. The project managers running these projects were trained, certified, and genuinely trying. What they were missing was a diagnostic framework.
A way of reading what was actually happening inside a project — underneath the status reports, underneath the dashboards, underneath the “everything is on track” that everyone keeps repeating until it suddenly isn’t.
So I built one. The SPARK Method™ grew directly from the field — from real projects, real Killers, real recoveries. Every element of it came from something I observed, documented, and eventually taught myself to see in the first days of a new engagement.
That is what drives me to pass it on now. Not to add another course to the internet. But because every project manager who learns to read these patterns early is a project that does not need a crisis intervention.
And because there is nothing quite like the moment when the gleam comes back into a project team’s eyes.
That is what this is all for.
— Dr. Martin Moss
Credentials
The Foundation Behind the Framework
The academic rigour that sits beneath 20 years of practical crisis recovery.
Not theory divorced from practice — research built from the same patterns observed in the field, across industries and project types.
The doctorate deepened what the work had already revealed: that IT project failure is almost always a human and organisational phenomenon, never a purely technical one.
Not remote advisory work.
Not reviews and recommendations delivered from a distance. Onsite — inside the organisations, inside the meetings, in the rooms where the real dynamics are visible and the real decisions are made.
That is where the 10 IT Project Killers were identified. That is where the SPARK Method™ was tested, refined, and proven.
The book that documents every IT Project Killer in full:
what it is, why it forms, what the warning signs look like across the steering committee, the project team, and the sponsor — and what to do about it before it becomes the crisis that defines a career.
Based entirely on real cases. No composite scenarios, no textbook examples.
Setup. Perform. Anticipate. Recover. Knowledge. Five phases. Ten Killers.
One structured, teachable system built from two decades of documented field experience.
Not opinion, not theory — a diagnostic framework that any project manager can apply to any IT project, from the first week of an engagement.
Independence
Why Independent? Because It Is the Only Way This Works.
A crisis recovery expert who is employed by the organisation he is trying to fix is not independent. He is constrained — by politics, by relationships, by the hierarchy he is supposed to be diagnosing.
I made the decision early that independence was not a lifestyle preference. It was a professional requirement.
“Being independent means I can tell a steering committee what is actually happening — not what they want to hear. It means I can refuse an engagement where the conditions make success impossible. And yes, I have done that.”
That independence is, of course, exactly why organisations bring me in.
When internal reviews keep producing the same answer and nothing changes, the value of an outside perspective that has no stake in protecting the existing narrative becomes very clear, very fast.
It also means I can teach from a position of full honesty. The SPARK Method™ courses contain nothing that has been softened for political palatability.
If something is true in real projects, it is in the framework — including the parts that are uncomfortable to say out loud.
The SPARK Method™ — What It Is and How It Works
The Framework
SETUP
Building the right project environment from the start — the motivational conditions that make the other four phases possible. Deep Dive Course 1: The Motivation Engine.
Perform
Leading the project team through sustained delivery pressure — the daily leadership moves that keep motivation alive when everything is pushing against it. Deep Dive Course 2: Lead Through Motivation.
Anticipate
Detecting IT Project Killers before they become crises — the three-source diagnostic system that turns early warning signals into clear, actionable pictures. Deep Dive Course 3: The Early Warning System.
Recover
Diagnosing and stopping active Killers in live projects under pressure — the rapid-response layer of the framework, for when the damage has already started.
Knowledge
The coaching and mentoring layer that embeds the methodology into how you think, observe, and act as a project leader — building capability that transfers across every future project.
Turn Chaos Into Winning Teams.
