Understanding the impact of a Chief Delivery Officer

Having spent some time considering the focus for the CDO, what you need them to achieve, you also want to understand the progress being made towards those outcomes.

These categories are common ones to use for determining impact.

• Delivery success
• Client satisfaction
• Service revenue
• Account growth
• Team development
• Problem sourcing
• Service channels
• Supplier management

There's lots of topics in this list, so be wary of making everything a target and your CDO never having any actual focus. All of these need to be covered in one way or another so you will need to have an approach for each category, but the tighter a Chief Delivery Officer can focus, the more likely that the outcomes can be achieved — juggling with 8 balls is harder than 5 is harder than 3 is harder than 1. Wherever you do need the CDO focus, though, needs to be aligned with your business strategy as a whole. You cannot have the rope being pulled in different directions.

The focus does not need to be a static thing. Over the course of time, as objectives are achieved, you should expect to refocus on the next important outcome. One simple example: if you have achieved the growth in revenues that you have aimed for, you may well need to look next at expanding your team, in both number and capability.

There are clear metrics for some of these. Others will take a bit of discussion and some work to identify how you can measure impacts in a simple-but-meaningful way.

Making sense of what to measure #

1. Delivery success and client satisfaction #

The top of the list is where the CDO gets the basics done — consistently achieving successful outcomes for your customers. That's true whether you're a creative or technical service business, a product or SaaS company with a professional services wrap-around, a heavy engineering firm, a not-for-profit organisation, or whatever — doing what you say you'll do for your clients is the primary task of a CDO.

2. Service revenue and account growth #

From that comes the next two — the income from what you do for your clients.

That means both overall revenue from your client-facing work, and the new opportunities that arise from healthy client relationships.

3. Team development and problem sourcing #

When your focus has moved further down the list then you know your service delivery is maturing and becoming a significant asset to the business:

• Growing your team, in number, skills, and capabilities
• Finding problems in delivery practices or processes, challenges in the team, and the business as a whole, and working towards solutions

3. Service channels and supplier management #

When you're looking at the items at the end of the list you're brining finesse and polish to what you do, through new products and services, servicing new sectors with better relationships, really pushing the boundaries of what you can do.

That is not to say that you need to work from the top to the bottom, and the context, the health and maturity, and the ambitions of your organisation will determine where you need to concentrate.

Nor are the labels for these categories universally applicable across all industries and sectors — a not-for-profit, for example, is unlikely to want to be framed by the revenue from their service delivery: you may want or need to find alternative or equivalent terms that are meaningful in your organisation, sector and context.

Remember to celebrate #

Don't forget to celebrate when objectives are achieved.

Working in these areas, your Chief Delivery Officer will be solving real business problems, managing risks, improving processes, and adding value to both your organisation and that of your customers. The things you measure will tell you the story behind that.

Note that what you're working on together here will be an enterprise-wide transformation. These don't happen overnight. Breaking it into chunks and identifying achievements and successes along the way will give you the nourishment needed to keep on going. It's important to acknowledge success when and where it happens, both internally and externally.