In mid-tier accountancy firms, achieving alignment between organisational priorities and the technology roadmap is rarely straightforward.
Managing Partners (MPs) carry responsibility for strategic and commercial direction, client relationships, organisational culture and overall financial stewardship, including budget setting and investment decisions. Meanwhile Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), and their equivalents, focus on the integrity, resilience, and evolution of the firm’s digital backbone. Their perspectives can diverge, their KPIs are likely to differ, and their pace of decision-making may not always match. Yet when both roles work in genuine partnership, they create the conditions for a coherent, future-ready firm.
A recent fireside discussion held at ICAEW’s Chartered Accountant’s Hall between Richard Spofforth, Managing Partner of Kreston Reeves, and Duncan Hardy, the firm’s Chief Technology Officer, offers a candid look at how their roles work in parallel. Their experiences highlight what constructive collaboration looks like in practice, the challenges that remain, and the principles that help both leaders steer a unified course.
A managing partner with a technologists insight
Richard’s path to becoming Managing Partner at Kreston Reeves has given him a deep understanding of the firm’s technology. While leading one of the firm’s service lines, he also oversaw the management and development of its technology - initially something he viewed as being “on the side”, but which grew into a substantial part of his remit. Entering the MP role with that strong tech grounding has, he suggests, given him a meaningful advantage in setting firmwide strategy and direction.
Firstly, it has enabled informed challenge. Rather than relying on high-level summaries or technical translations, he has been able to interrogate proposals directly and get to the core of an issue more quickly. By removing the need to unpack and explain the problem, and shifting the conversation straight to potential solutions, decisions can be made more quickly and with greater confidence.
Secondly, that clearer understanding helps Richard identify hidden or downstream costs. Many digital investments require ongoing maintenance, integration effort, data migrations, or security considerations that are not immediately visible. Appreciating these elements allows him to avoid unintended consequences.
Thirdly, Richard highlighted the value of a leadership team that understands data risks, regulatory demands, and the wider implications of key system decisions, particularly how those decisions affect day-to-day operations. This level of awareness, he noted, is essential for building organisational resilience.
Finally, Richard emphasises the importance and value of having a dedicated CTO. Technology leadership is a deep, fast-moving and complex discipline that requires focused executive attention. Success is driven by a strong partnership between MP and CTO that seamlessly brings together complementary strengths.
A CTO's perspective
Duncan joined Kreston Reeves with experience spanning multiple sectors, a background that, he explains, shapes how he approaches the role. At first glance industries may differ, but the underlying ambitions of organisations are often remarkably consistent. Regardless of size or market, most are seeking growth, stability, and a route to sustainable change. Recognising these commonalities allows him to bring lessons learned elsewhere into the professional services environment.
Duncan highlights that expectations around technology investment vary significantly dependent upon the scale of the organisation. In larger organisations, iterative design and development is often deliberately built into both budgeting and delivery processes, creating space to test, learn quickly, and refine solutions over time. By contrast, smaller firms with more limited capital budgets have far less tolerance for missteps; proportionately, the cost of failure is higher, leading to a stronger emphasis on just-in-time delivery and getting solutions right first time. Duncan argues, however, that capital constraint should not eliminate iteration altogether. Instead, firms should set realistic budgets, adopt proportionate development and innovation approaches, and foster a culture that supports controlled experimentation, ensuring business value is released quickly and continuously, while remaining mindful of cost.
One advantage at Kreston Reeves, he observes, is the high level of digital literacy across the firm. Reinforcing Richard’s perspective, he explains that for him this shortens the distance between a tech proposal and meaningful dialogue. Instead of spending significant time explaining fundamental concepts, he can engage in more strategic conversation with leaders who already understand the baseline. Because technology is cumulative and today’s systems underpin tomorrow’s evolution, a shared grasp of the current environment accelerates planning and improves execution.
Navigating the challenges
Despite strong alignment at leadership level, both acknowledge that challenges still exist. One is the integration of technologists into the fabric of the firm. Professional services partnerships are culturally and operationally complex; understanding how decisions are made, how work flows, and how to navigate internal dynamics takes time. This cultural onboarding is essential for any CTO seeking to drive change.
Another challenge is maintaining perspective when disagreements inevitably arise. Technology choices often involve trade-offs between innovation and stability, cost and capability, customisation and standardisation. When friction occurs, both leaders stress the importance of stepping back and remembering that they are ultimately trying to solve the same problem. This ability to pause, re-align and return to the shared objective is a defining feature of their partnership.
What makes the MP to CTO relationship effective?
In mid tier firms, balancing innovation against a resilient core technology stack, and often a patchwork of platforms inherited from consolidation activity, requires discipline and partnership. Richard and Duncan highlight three factors that make the relationship effective:
- Neutral trust and mutual respect
Both leaders bring distinct experience and expertise. For the relationship to work, the MP must deploy the CTO’s skills wisely, and the CTO must trust the MP’s broader strategic understanding. This mutual respect creates a foundation for honest dialogue and confident decision-making.
- Shared strategic ownership
An effective MP - CTO relationship is grounded in shared strategic ownership, not one way instruction. The CTO does not simply translate an agreed strategy into a technology roadmap; they actively shape that strategy, bringing a technology informed perspective to wider business decisions. As a business leader with a deep technology specialism, the CTO works alongside the MP to define a coherent strategic direction and determine how technology can best enable it.
- A knowledgeable leadership team
When leaders possess a reasonable level of tech understanding, conversations are more meaningful and decisions are faster. This avoids the risk of discussions becoming superficial or conducted at too surface a level to make fully informed decisions. The quality of dialogue directly influences the quality of outcomes.
Final thoughts
Aligning leadership and technology is not a one-off exercise but a continuous discipline. The MP-CTO relationship sits at the heart of that alignment, shaping not only the firm’s digital strategy but also its culture, resilience, and capacity to adapt. As Richard and Duncan demonstrate, when leadership combines strategic clarity with tech fluency, firms are better positioned to make confident decisions and sustain long-term progress.
