When IT keeps being the explanation, find out what is actually blocking the business.

Recognition

When to bring in Plain Ops after close

• Diligence surfaced an IT or security issue, but nobody has turned it into an owned and sequenced post-close plan.
• The 100-day or value-creation plan depends on IT, and urgent work keeps displacing the people needed to deliver it.
• Integration, add-on, carve-out, or TSA work is exposing ownership, dependency, or handoff problems the current operating model is not absorbing cleanly.
• Management can describe the problem but does not have room to stabilize current operations and drive the required changes at the same time.
• Capital or vendor requests are arriving before the business can connect the spend to the investment thesis and the result it is supposed to produce.
• The same operating problem survived a new leader, tool, vendor, or governance layer.

What I do

Follow the work until the explanation holds up.

I follow the work across teams and vendors, reconstruct who owns the result, where calls wait, what keeps getting started, what keeps reopening, and where handoffs recycle. Then I isolate the few mechanisms responsible for most of the drag.

You get a straight operating view and a practical next move. Not a maturity score or a transformation program. If the question needs specialist diligence, I say so and keep that boundary visible.