Get the best from your Chief Delivery Officer

Before you become or you hire a Chief Delivery Officer, you need to consider the following questions and know how the business is going to answer them.

1. What do you want your Chief Delivery Officer to achieve?
2. Where will they go in the organisation?
3. At what level of seniority will they sit?
4. What and how are you going to invest in customer delivery?

You need to have worked through the first question before you can make progress with the other three, and hopefully this Handbook will help you to wrestle with the issues this question poses. The answers to the subsequent three questions will determine the reach and scope that the Chief Delivery Officer will have. Even the best CDO around will be able to have little impact if they are stuck in the day-to-day of specific customer project work and never get the chance to stand on higher ground, to take the time to survey the horizon, build plans, and work out how to execute them. But first they need clear objectives to work towards.

Here, then, are some initial pointers for ways you can think about these things so that the CDO and the organisation are both set up for success. For context, though, it's important to remember why the business needs a Chief Delivery Officer in the first place.

A place for focus #

Delivery touches every part of the company, all pulling together to shape your clients' experience. But the needs of the business will likely depend on your organisational ambitions.

👉 You may need someone to lead from the front, setting and maintaining the standards, giving confidence to your customers and your team, handling escalation.

👉 You may need someone to design your delivery strategy — bringing order out of chaos, so you have coherence, consistency, and high performance in what you do for your clients.

👉 You may need someone to work specifically on improving project governance — meaningful metrics, efficient risk management, and clear communication with your customers that enables thoughtful project oversight and effective decision making.

👉 You may need someone to build your team, enabling and equipping capable people to perform at their best, bringing different skills and capabilities into alignment to deliver as one high-functioning team.

Work out what you want to achieve is the first step. That'll help to frame the job description and those vital early conversations so you and your CDO understand where you're aiming together.

Here's some key things to keep in mind as you consider what you want your CDO to achieve, though.

We'll talk more in due course about how you can understand (and probably measure) the impact of your CDO. For now, though, just keep this in mind: if you set an objective, it be framed by a specific result to aim at.

This or that #

We'll discuss terminology below, but for now let's consider the several aspects of client-facing roles, what's similar or shared between them, and what's distinctive about customer delivery. With that in mind it will be clearer to understand if and why customer delivery could or should be separated out from other roles, which will then help to determine what you want your Chief Delivery Officer to achieve.

Whilst the sales portion of the business interacts with your customers, until they move out of the 'prospect' phase, in truth, isn't really a customer. As they move closer towards that 'pre-contract' phase then it can useful to talk about a prospect as a customer.

This latter stage of the journey is often referred to as 'pre-sales', characterised by demonstrations and technical reviews, evaluations and trials, and so on. It's fair to say, then, that this pre-sales stage is a customer-facing role, even though strictly speaking it's part of the sales experience of the customer journey.

There's also an important part of the customer journey that (usually) follows on from the project delivery stage, once the work you've done for your client is in live service, whether that's a digital tool or system in live usage, a marketing strategy that's being implemented, a brand in action, or whatever. At this stage, your customer is trying to make best use of what you've created for them, to execute it successfully, to find new, interesting and innovative ways to use it and to work out what to do next. This phase is often referred to as 'customer success', and period of a special relationship with your customer that may see many opportunities for new business with them.

That means that there's three stages of the customer journey that are particularly client-facing and interact here.

• Pre-Sales
  — before the thing, in the run up to signing contracts
• Delivery
  — doing the thing, executing on what you've agreed you'll do together
• Success
  — after the thing, making the most of what you've done

The relationship between these three are intricate and sometimes clear lines of delineation aren't obvious. There's at least two positions you might take here, and which one you chose or prefer may depend on your company culture, your organisational structure, or even your market or sector.

1. Sales for when you're selling #

The first and the third of these have a strong connection with the sales process. With the first, you're taking people on the journey to signing a contract. With the third, you're looking for continued business or opportunities for new business. That gives both a very strong sales flavour, so it may be worth viewing them both in that mode and under that department.

The advantage of this approach lies in playing to the strengths of each department, so the client gets specialists helping them at each stage of their journey.

… OR …

2. It's all part of the customer journey #

For some customers, and some businesses too, having a strong delineation between sales and delivery is problematic and it can feel like the customer is being 'thrown over the fence' from one department to another once they sign the contract. It can be a strong differentiator to see the customer journey as one unified whole, from beginning to end. In practice, what that would mean is that the customer would be working with essentially the same team the whole way through, from pitch to live service (though you will probably need to augment the team during the delivery phase with particular specialists or sheer numbers to get the work done, of course).

It can save you headaches: in transferring knowledge, and in maintaining a coherent tone of voice throughout the customer journey.

Whichever tack you prefer to take, the objective for your CDO will be different.

With the first, your CDO is a collaborator with others, working as one of a team to create a unified customer experience from beginning to end. There's obvious benefits here for the business in the dependency on a collaborative organisational culture. It also defines the relationship between your business and your customers — that they are something the business does something for.

With the second, your CDO is responsible for the whole customer journey, with a strategy that has a whole arc from beginning to end. The benefit for the business here is in having a single person with an oversight of the customer experience, bringing coherence from start to end. This approach can also foster a closer collaborative relationship with your customers — they are something the business does something with.

Where, what, and how #

Where the CDO is found in the organisation will depend, then, on the above. But it may also be a decision that is shaped by other internal factors, particularly on internal politics. This is something to be very mindful of, something that happens in any organisation, any body of people, with every new role. But it's something that's not sustainable and you will need a good, healthy response.

Companies naturally change and evolve in response to events and conditions. People naturally move around in the business, and come into or move out of the company. What you want to guard against is losing valuable people, capabilities, corporate knowledge, and so on, as a result of personality clashes or perceived slight. Doing the work in advanced to understand where your Chief Delivery Officer sits in the business and why will save you a lot of pain later on.

The essential guiding principle when adding a CDO role is that it needs to be in a business function that allows the CDO to have an effect across the whole company. Delivering for the organisation's customers or service users is not solely the responsibility of the delivery team, it's a key focus for the whole business. Customers will not have the same sense of boundaries as the team, they're just buying a product or service from your company — organisational structure and internal politics are meaningless to the outside of the business. You should not contain your Chief Delivery Officer in a silo if you want to get the best value from them.

The level of responsibility you give to the CDO role is just as significant. You have options with pros and cons for each, so they need to be considered carefully.

1. If they report directly to the CEO it'll make a powerful statement about the importance of client delivery, but you'll need to think about the ramifications for others at that top leadership level.
2. Conversely, you could locate your client delivery lead inside an existing office in the business, such as technology or production (if you're a digital or design or marketing business), or even operations, say. That can make things tidy within an existing organisational structure, and be the position that makes the fewest changes and ruffles the fewest feathers. The problem, though, is it also contains the notion that 'customers are the responsibility of the whole business' inside an existing box.
3. So a third option, and maybe the most natural, is to find a cross-functional location in the business, so your CDO is not in a silo and can do full justice to the role. It's important for the CDO to sit close the creative and production parts of the business but, as we've discussed, these are not the only parts of the business looking after customers and their concerns. That means that sitting close to the business with a degree of autonomy is probably important.

Whichever you determine is best for you and your context, do make sure you understand why and what difference it makes.

Before we finish here, let's take a quick look a terminology.

Throughout the Handbook we refer to a 'Chief Delivery Officer' rather than other similar labels such as Client Services Director, a Professional Services lead (more appropriate in product or software-as-a-service [SaaS] businesses), or the head of a Project Management Office (PMO). Whilst some of those titles might make specific sense in certain contexts they don't necessarily in others (a 'director', for instance, commonly implies a board-level role, but it's increasingly used for roles of slightly-more-senior managers of things).

There's also roles and responsibilities that are closely connected, as discussed above, such as 'customer success' — many of these are dimensions of sales processes, but the customer's experience of the company should be differentiated by the stage they're at. Moreover, all of it is part of what they're being delivered — the thinking about what they want and need (the sales stage), actually doing the thing for them (the delivery stage), and getting the most out of it or even planning what next (the success stage).

Here, though, in the Handbook we will continue to use the label 'Chief Delivery Officer' primarily, and CDO as the contraction. Usually when the other terms slip in, it's to indicate a particular context or usage.

Lastly, note also that despite the CDO covering lots of what might be called 'project management', we're opting to use the word 'delivery' rather than 'project' because we're using a verb rather than a noun — the Chief Delivery Officer is doing something, taking a thing from here to there and making sure it does that safely, rather than managing an unwieldy and unruly thing to bring it to order. Active, rather than passive.