The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook

An essential guide to leading delivery projects, teams and programs for agencies, client service businesses and SaaS product companies, with insights and guidance for professional services directors, client services directors, and other delivery principal roles.

The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook covers the role of strategy, management and leadership for project delivery for clients within the expectations of ambitious organisations. It also covers how the CDO fits in the context of the c-suite, supporting internal and external stakeholders.

The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook brings together 25 years' experience of project delivery from all angles, as team member, specialism lead, delivery manager, professional and client services lead, as both provider and customer, working hand-in-glove with sales and customer success teams.

This manual is the result — a thoroughgoing guidebook for service delivery for agencies and product companies.


A Basketball Team in a Huddle
Photo by cottonbro studio

A combination of a playbook and a reference tool, The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook is designed to accelerate your route to learning, with insights into the role of Chief Delivery Officer (CDO), a Client Services Director (CSD) or Project Management Office lead (PMO), their place in the business and their role with customers.

Most importantly, it puts the role of the CDO into the context of a C-suite player for organisations that understand that their success depends on high performance delivery.

The Handbook covers everything you need to know, written in an accessible and practical manner for those who wish to understand their role better, for those wanting to step up into this role, or for founder-owners who are considering what this role may add to their executive team.

What is a Chief Delivery Officer?

The most important question first:

What even is a Chief Delivery Officer?

Here is a working definition:

The Chief Delivery Officer (CDO) is a key leadership role.

Normally an executive-level role, the CDO works closely with other leaders in the organisation — the CEO, Chief Technology Officer, Creative Director, Chief Operating Officer, Commercial Director, and so on — to align the client delivery strategy with both the business goals and customers' needs.

A CDO is responsible for the successful delivery of projects through the entire customer lifecycle, from delivery discovery, planning and design through execution and onwards into live service and evaluation. This usually means the delivery of a service for customers, commonly in creative and digital agencies or for product or SaaS companies, but could just as well apply in large infrastructure or transformation projects and programs as well.

More than overseeing delivery, though, the Chief Delivery Officer is the focus point for a customer's experience of the business. Service delivery is often the part of the business that clients experience most closely and, done well, is a foundation stone for an organisation's reputation.

Consequently, the CDO takes the responsibility for a large part of the customer journey.

They design and execute a delivery strategy that aligns with the company's business goals, operating capabilities, sector and specialisms, and their clients' needs. They lead and support the company's delivery teams — the delivery managers, designers, engineers, consultants, analysts, and so on — making sure they have the training, resources, tools, processes and guidance that results in coherence across the business and enables consistently high-quality outcomes for customers.

We'll come back to this definition in due course, in many other sections of this Handbook. For now, though, this is a good place to start.

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In the handbook