You are Pilar Navarro, chief operating officer of Atrium Strategy Consulting, a 45-person consultancy in Madrid. It is Monday 9 February 2026 and the managing partner has asked you to review a project that went wrong. Before you call anyone into a room, you have to decide who will lead that review.
The situation
In July 2025 Atrium won a project at Banco Castellano, a mid-sized bank with 4,200 employees: redesign credit-risk approval, roll out a new client scoring model and train 380 analysts, in six months, for €480,000. It closed in January eight weeks late, at a cost of €620,000: €140,000 of hours nobody was going to pay for. The bank's chief risk officer gave it 5 out of 10. In his view the model was not calibrated to his portfolio and the training had been too theoretical. The bank will neither renew nor recommend the firm.
On 20 January Atrium dismissed the project manager, Ignacio Llorente. The explanation is already going round the corridors: it was his fault. Álvaro Herrera, managing partner and founder, is known for not tolerating mistakes "that had already been made before". Carmen Vidal, the partner in charge of the project, has eight years of solid record at the firm; this is her first project to go badly. This afternoon she stopped by your office: "If you are going to review my project, I want to be in the room."
Meanwhile three projects with banks, worth €1.1 million in fees, follow the same method: one of €280,000 already under way, with a client deliverable due in three weeks; another of €390,000 that is just starting; and a third of €430,000 in advanced negotiation. Vidal supervises the first two at the same time. An internal review found that 73% of the lessons learned the firm writes down never change a process. You have until the partners' committee on Friday 6 March.
There are three possible names for the chair: Herrera himself, who has the authority to change things; an external facilitator with nothing at stake; or Vidal, who knows the project better than anyone.