Here we look at how you can sketch out the environment of BAU.
Who's making delivery decisions?
How they are being made that way?
And why?
Plus, engaging with and unpicking the history into which you're walking.
One of the hardest things for a new Chief Delivery Officer is to design and execute a delivery strategy as the organisation, necessarily, continues with all the stuff daily business, with all the bad habits and problematic practices that are the reasons for having the CDO in the first place, often with a lack of planning or adequate governance.
I've been dropped into the middle of plenty of projects without a meaningful handover, without the documentation or digest needed to keep track of progress, the decisions made along the way.
At times, it felt like trying to perform diagnostics and essential maintenance on a rally car that's in the middle of a race, speeding along a forest track taking a bunch of near-misses with trees and hidden dips.
Peak under the bonnet and you may find the engine of a family car, or discover the tyres are bald or too small for the task … or some other way of pushing the analogy too hard.