Here we look at how the CDO relates to the rest of the business.
In particular, we examine how the CDO is different from a Chief Customer Officer, and how that role relates to other leaders in the organisation.
Most important, we shine a light on the vital relationship with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Lastly, here we look at the key topics of developing people and capabilities, and building and maintaining working relationships, in the context of the responsibility for consistent customer outcomes.
This chapter, then, is aimed at the business stakeholders.
This chapter takes a long hard look at how a Chief Delivery Officer relates to colleagues in the business.
In the first place, that's about how the role finds a distinctive place at an increasingly crowded table in the C-suite.
For organisations that understand that their success depends on high performance work for clients, that's an easier position to take. For businesses with existing roles that may overlap — Chief Information Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and more — that may require elbows that are more pointed to advocate for this vital voice.
Most important here is the relationship with the CEO, so that customer delivery and/or product objectives are tightly aligned to the aims of the business as a whole, enabling the organisation to keep moving forwards to those objectives.
The second aspect, though, is that delivering consistent outcomes has huge dependencies on other parts of the business.
In order to achieve what's needed for each project, the delivery unit will need to lean on things that are the remit of other departments:
- marketing — to understand properly what the organisations customers, clients, or product users actually want
- sales — to determine the specifics of what's to be done with clarity and specificity, and to ensure a coherent experience from beginning to end
- operations — so that the day-to-day working environment is well-managed, equipped, resourced, efficient, and resilient
- finance — for the stability, current and future resourcing, and thorough planning necessary to achieve the organisational goals
… and so on.
And then thirdly, we look at the CDO's responsibility for the health of the organisation.
That's specifically about developing people, their skills and capabilities, supporting them as they grow towards their own goals.
It's also about developing the resilience of the business — making sure that knowledge is consistently shared and turned into organisational learning, that reusability is a central concern, that every day the business is more robust and capable than the day before.