Whether you're a services business or a product company, you need to deliver work for your clients. Often it's the part of the business that your clients experience most closely and, done well, is a foundation stone for your reputation.
Consequently, delivery touches every part of your organisation. A CDO brings the integration between vision, strategy, and execution that you need to excel.
Hiring a CDO at the right level will be a big investment for the business. The person themselves will have costs, and they will likely also bring a team with them, maybe a mixture of internal and external people. There will be disruption to business-as-usual and a reduction in velocity whilst change is happening that itself will incur costs.
So why do it?
The business has been getting along fine so far. Why create the headache?
It's likely that some of the capabilities and skills for delivery already exist within the team, with scrum masters and delivery managers overseeing projects, and technical architects or senior designers who lead aspects of work and can deputise for delivering projects if needs be. Larger organisations may even have people in fairly senior roles, as a delivery lead or principal with responsibility for multiple projects simultaneously.
However, there may also be some core capabilities that are missing from the delivery office, or are subsumed under departments or aspects of the business and not properly devolved to the delivery office. A CDO who is given the task of bringing coherence, consistency, and high performance in delivering successfully for clients may also with to recruit for specific skills.
It's worth reflecting here, though — did the business actually get along just fine before the Chief Delivery Officer?
There's at least two answers to that question.
Firstly, of course they did — they wouldn’t be in business otherwise.
Secondly, though, it's quite likely that the business hasn't actually been doing that well, struggling in one or more aspects of delivering for clients, without acknowledging it or really understanding why.
Sometimes, it's obvious that something's not working — stressed staff, unhappy clients, missed deadlines, etc.
Sometimes, it's only through interpreting secondary symptoms that you realise there's a problem — the business feels like it's hit a ceiling of growth that it just can't push through, say. Sometimes, it's just a sense that the founder(s) or CEO has that things could be better.
Delivery, governance, strategy #
Projects need people to lead them.
Work for a client needs someone to be responsible for making sure it gets delivered.
That person makes sure the right people are doing the right things at the right time in the right way, with the resources and tools they need to get it done, with problems identified and risks raised and all handled appropriately to keep things on track and to get things to the destination as planned.
Project managers, delivery managers, team leads — all very straightforward and obvious roles, and it makes sense to hire as many project and/or delivery managers as you need, trained and empowered, to keep the show on the road.
As a first impression, this is a fairly compelling way to address issues with delivering services for clients. The more clients and the more projects you have, the more people you hire to cover all the things. It's a fairly simple logic.
Project management and delivery skills are important, and it's vital to have skilled and capable people in these roles so that your clients and customers get the quality of work they expect.
But this approach to scaling is brittle and will inevitably come unstuck.
More than delivery #
There's two dimensions here where more is required than just adding more delivery managers, one that is mostly outward-facing, one looking more inwards. These two dimensions are the key places where a Chief Delivery Officer brings value.
👉For the first, for client work to be and remain healthy it needs more than just project management. It needs healthy and productive client relationships with good oversight, consistent focus on the objectives, and effective decisions.
👉With the second, for the business itself to improve and grow it needs more than extra people delivering (more) stuff. It needs a destination to achieve, and a path of growth and improvement to get there.
The broad labels for each of these two aspects are governance and strategy.
Governance #
Both client projects and healthy customer relationships depend on good governance, including things like:
- oversight of what's been done and what's going to be happening, and why, to support effective decision-making
- ensuring that tasks and outcomes are and remain aligned with user needs and business objectives, and negotiating effectively to keep expectations on track
- tracking and monitoring project quality and performance metrics based on milestones, spend, and resources, with a particular focus on budgets and revenue
- accurate projections and project forecasts that pinpoint risks and other discrepancies, and enable actions to be taken
- identifying opportunities to achieve benefits, reduce risks, make savings, or seize new or unexplored possibilities or areas for growth
… and so on.
Strategy #
As the business grows in its capabilities and its size, the capacity for delivery needs to increase as well, which means a focus on:
- a high-performance customer experience based in a coherent client services vision with effective processes
- identifying problems and opportunities for improvements in service delivery, practices, skills and learning, processes, and automations
- monitoring revenue and spend with clear and timely projections that enable effective capacity planning and a smart recruitment strategy
- data, planning and activity for everything from supporting individual bids to expansion into new markets, sectors and technologies
- tools, tool kits, processes and practices with playbooks, guides, help cards, templates and more that facilitates healthy growth and organisational development
- motivating and empowering teams to perform at their best, fostering a positive and inclusive culture aligned with the company’s values, with helpful coaching, mentoring and feedback
- wise approaches to innovations and new technologies, embracing change and hungry to improve whilst wary of hype and bubbles that quickly burst
… and so on.
The value of a CDO #
All together, a Chief Delivery Officer brings a whole-organisation and cross-functional perspective to what the business does for its customers.
An effective CDO will have the customer's complete journey, from first encounter to repeat business, in their sights as the design a delivery strategy fit for use and then execute it to embed it in the business.
As a consequence, the CDO will bring an essential unifying view to those things in the business that often are otherwise disconnected, joining together marketing with relationship management, design with finance with sales, engineering with HR, and so on. The intention is that the character of the business, its voice and it's messaging, are unified in the customer experience so that there's a consistent experience from beginning to end.
Bringing organisational change #
This should probably be understood under the umbrella of culture shift: it will likely demand that the organisation thinks differently and acts differently.
Although the CDO will have a large individual impact, one person alone will not be able to bring about the changes needed to get the best outcomes for the organisation.
Even a team, small or large, will likely be overawed by the scale of the task to bring coherence to customer delivery, giving it the important and central place in the company's focus.
Only when the whole business works together with the CDO and their team will the task be achievable.
A fractional CDO #
For some businesses, particularly ambitious companies that understand the need for high professionalism but, for whatever reason, don't want to take on a full-time CDO hire, a fractional Chief Delivery Officer may be an option.
A fractional CDO will work closely with a CEO or founder to align the client delivery strategy and execution with both the business goals and their customers' needs.
The right fractional CDO will give you the combination of strategic insight and deep hands-on customer delivery expertise that you need as you scale your business. And that means a fractional Chief Delivery Officer will help you overcome scaling challenges without the cost and commitment of a full-time hire.