Notes
How the method was written.
Short papers a sponsor can circulate inside a ministry. They are not a substitute for a diagnosis, and they are not a claim to have delivered the programmes they cite.
Abolish first
Abolish before you digitise
Digitising twelve steps only automates the waste. The cut is the work.
A ministry that buys a platform for the process it already has will spend the next three years reconciling the new system with the old habit. The number on the dashboard will still be wrong, only faster.
FAROL treats the as-is as something to observe on site, not to describe in a workshop. Every step has to justify the risk it controls. The ones that survive are the ones a rule, a statute or a real control actually requires. The target is half of them gone before a line of code is written.
This is the rule that failed programmes broke most often. It is also the rule that makes a ninety-day lighthouse possible: there is no time to rebuild twelve steps that should not exist.
Ninety days
Why nobody should be asked to believe a five-year programme
A public budget cycle is a year. A credible offer has to fit inside one.
Five-year digitisation programmes ask a minister to carry the risk of being wrong past their own tenure. That is why they are easy to announce and hard to stop. The failures we read — closely, including the ones that cost billions — shared this shape: no kill gate, no visible user, and a vendor who was still indispensable at year four.
FAROL's second phase is a lighthouse: one improvement, working, in ninety days, run by the client's own staff. If the target metrics are missed, the programme stops. The risk of the answer sits with us, not with a successor who inherits a contract.
F0, the three-week diagnosis, is how a contracting authority tests that claim without buying the rest. You see how we work before you fund a phase.
What we studied
What we studied — and what we are not claiming
Rwanda, Estonia, Cape Verde and the others are source material. They are not a client list.
FAROL was written from public-sector digitisation programmes that worked, and from the ones that did not. We read national efforts across ten countries, including Rwanda, Estonia, Cape Verde, Kenya, Togo, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. The failures taught more than the successes.
What survived that reading became rules we hold ourselves to: focus on an outcome, not a requirements list; cut the process before the software; deliver something a user can see inside one budget cycle; put the client’s staff in operation from day one; produce a ledger of evidence that funds the next phase.
We do not implement those governments’ platforms, and we do not put their crests on this site. If a sponsor needs to understand how the method was derived, we will walk through the reading. If a sponsor needs a reference from work we have done, that is given privately, with consent.
For how an engagement is commissioned, see the public sector page. For the rules we will not break, see integrity.
Tell us what you are trying to fix.
We will tell you whether it is a process problem, a data problem, or neither.