Explore every episode of the podcast Deliver That!

A little announcement for you.

It’s summer, just about, so we’re taking a little break from the podcast. Time for some holidays, to rest and recharge and regather ourselves ready for more discussions on leading projects and delivery teams, and everything involved in getting big stuff done.

So, we’re off for a while. But we’ll be back soon, ready to go.

Thanks for listening along to everything we’ve talked about so far. We really appreciate your company.

While we’re away, do listen back to anything you’ve missed. And send us a message, if you’d like, with your thoughts or questions on the things we’ve covered and the things we haven’t. To do that, you can find out everything you need at deliverthatpodcast.com.

So, we’ll see you when we’re back in a few weeks.

Until then, ciao. Have a good one.

You've started a new role as CDO. How do you get up and running?

The first month in a new position is the time for making impressions: for what you can understand about the business and it's for you to make your impression on the organisation too.

We talk about what's running through your mind in those first weeks, and discuss some practical things to do to get your bearings.

How do you take a group of competent individuals and bring them together into a high-performing team?

We take a look at the presumptions, rules-of-thumb, and particular actions a Chief Delivery Officer can take to raise the water level so all the boats float higher.

And then we discuss how things can get off balance and the potential to sink a happy ship, the strange tidal forces both inside and outside the team.

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We begin our conversation talking about 'normal times', taking a group of people and doing the hard work to gel them into an effective team and lift them to high performance.

Beginning with an assumption of individual expertise in each of their fields you're aiming to create a 'one team' mindset, all working towards a single goal:

• This is what we’re trying to do
• This is how we’re trying to do it
• This is how you add to that

We then discuss some of the practical actions to get there, including:

• Shared outcomes — everyone owns it, the good and the bad; learning and improving together
• Show-and-tell — demonstrate what you’ve done, describe why it’s important; receive recognition, and maybe a platform to display that, internally or externally
• Praise, credit, and encouragement — direct, one-to-one; within the team; to the wider business and/or clients
• Standards — establishing, achieving, and maintaining standards; lifting the bar
• Personal development — Who do you really want to be? What do you really want to do? How can we get you there?
• Offboarding people — sometimes you need to recognise dead wood and do the tough task of trimming

In the second half, the conversation turns to those things that can cause your sleek powerboat to sink.

First, we discuss rock stars and divas in delivery teams.

They can be a huge asset, the big guns that you can pull out to deal with difficult problems or important achievements. But rock stars can get frustrated, bored, or even resentful and cause all kinds of chaos. There's ways of responding to that, which may mean keeping them out of the ongoing work of a delivery team, but could also mean using them as ambassadors for your organisation's rock star capabilities.

And then we talk about less containable outside forces. We look at the impact of micro-managers in the executive or other parts of the business. And we talk about commercial pressures — commercial performance in the business, which you may be powerless to resist, and commercial dynamics in the market, which may force you to pivot.

Lovely though the views are, you're static on the mountain top. The journey doesn't happen here.

To get stuff done you have to come back down to ground level.

This is the world of your tactics.

In part 2 of the conversation we talk about execution — taking the strategy you created at the top of the hill and turning it into reality, with a thoroughgoing set of turn-by-turn actions.

This isn't a conversation about day-to-day delivery management — you already know plenty about all that. This is about executing your strategy.

We look at 4 dimensions:

1. Tactics: step-by-step instructions
2. Tactics: equipped for the journey
3. Tactics: managing risks, known and unknown
4. Tactics: Supporting the team, maintaining the tools

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Note: Strategy should always come first

Tactics are a vector property. It's not just speed you want but velocity — travel in a particular direction. Tactics need to be directed toward a goal or outcome in order to have focus and purpose.

Tactics depend on strategy.

 

Beware of too much improvisation, too often

Often the term 'tactics' is used as a synonym of 'improvise', but that's not really right. Yes, occasionally you will have to react, to be spontaneous.

But if you're doing that too often then it's a strong clue that you didn't spend long enough at high altitude, that you were impatient.

Pause.

And go back up the hill.

 

As with many aspects of the CDO role, being able to hold a creative tension between strategy and execution is a distinctive quality.

The role requires you to do both

• to see far ahead, and determine how to get where you're going
• and, to take one step at a time on the path you've set, without getting distracted or discouraged.

Or, to put it differently, it's about altitudes of thinking

• taking the time to stand on higher ground to get the long view
• whilst knowing that things are put into action back at ground level

In part 1 of this conversation we talk about the first part — the need to build a delivery strategy and how you might go about doing that.

We start by asking the big 'why?' question — why do you even need a delivery strategy in the first place? — which is actually two questions:

• Why are we doing what we’re doing?
• Where do we want to be in 6/12/24/whatever months, and why?

We then spend a while milking a powerful but progressively more tenuous metaphor:

Walk up the hill to see the horizon

At ground level, things can appear quite suddenly and erratically, almost as if out of nowhere. That'll cause you big problems, as if you're always putting in effort just to stand still. And it's because your view is too short — the horizon is very close, where things can hit you without much warning.

You need to get to higher ground where the horizon is further out and your view is both longer and broader, taking in the landscape all around you.

• Keep focused on the end-goal, on the outcome you want
• Take account of what's immovable in between
• Evaluate what's moving, and understand the risk it poses on your path
• Choose the optimum route to get to that destination
• Work out a plan for the journey you're going to take
• Test that plan as thoroughly as you can, so you're not unduly surprised
• Break the whole thing down into achievable steps
• Work out how you're going to know how you're getting on when your vision isn't as clear, when things get tough
• Put in place the team and the equipment you'll need along the way

How do you get going? What does a delivery strategy look like?

In the second half of the show we talk more about how you can build a strategy, and some of what you should be including in your strategy.

We talk about important elements, like …

• Problem sourcing
  • A methodical practice for identifying problems in the business, proposing solutions, and determining priorities
• Processes
  • The systems needed for what should be done at different stages of the organisational lifecycle
• Tools and methods
  • The right practices of the right kind for the specific configuration and context of your team
• Ways of working
  • What is the operating model for your team to work together, to achieve consistency and quality?
• Documenting all the things
  • Creating the map for the journey you're going to be taking
• Metrics
  • Understand the progress you're making — what gets measured gets managed

Professionalism demands that project delivery processes are comprehensive and robust.

That creates the right foundation for delivery jazz — situational agility and innovation.

The delivery principal must hold the tension in a fundamental balancing act between:

• systematic and thoroughgoing processes on the one hand, and
• situational agility with space for improvisation and innovation on the other

This gives us another C to add the three we've covered in part 1:

• Calmness
• Confidence
• Consistency, and
• Creativity

Over-boiling process that throttles creativity can be tragic for experts and specialists in delivery teams, creating a flight risk that puts projects and businesses in peril.

But beware of the trouble with delivery principals who see themselves as solo jazz artists or thunder gods — the tamers of chaos.

You know the type — those always adapting on the fly, whose processes and practices aren't well structured but flexed to suit business and client’s needs or expectations

They thrive in chaos, so they keep creating chaos in order to thrive. But that's problematic for growth — they will bristle, and may even choke off the growth business itself.

As the business matures, it stretches forward towards greater professionalism. We talk about the three Cs that are the aim of professionalism:

• Calmness
• Confidence
• Consistency

We talk about the essence of professionalism:

• Capturing 'our ways of working'
• Making sure there's always value delivered — for customers, and for the standing of the business
• Ensuring efficiency — removing unnecessary overheads
• Giving clarity
• And making the best client experience possible

And we talk about how hyper-growth can jeopardise a lot of that!

Professionalism demands that project delivery processes are comprehensive and robust. In the second half of the episode we talk about the 'why' of processes — why they're there:

• they're the way you do things, adding to the distinctive character of the business
• they're reliable, replicable practices — and that can lead to automations
• they're clear, and can be explained easily to customers

But processes should also be separate from the person themself, like a product for the business.

Lastly we talk about the hazard of processes that over-boil!

Communication is a key skill in all jobs, right?

Well, clear and coherent communication is of a different order for a Chief Delivery Officer — unusual excellence in communication is a fundamental requirement of the job and an essential skill that should be particularly well developed.

The CDO is responsible for effective communication between all parties on projects: clear communication is vital to achieve outcomes. The CDO determines what and how a business communicates with customers and stakeholders. And so the CDO should show distinctive leadership in this key area.

In this episode we discuss the astonishing breadth of modes and contexts for communication for a CDO, verbal and non-verbal, in meetings and events and ad hoc, in big groups and small groups as much as one-to-one, both in person and asynchronous, and all manner of other ways.

We talk also about how a deep and practical understanding of multiple intelligences and personality types can be a giant power-up for transformative and effective communication.

In the second half of the episode, we look more practically at communicating with customers and with colleagues, and how a CDO should be conscious of how the mode and manner of communication needs to adapt according to context and needs.

Find out more at deliverthatpodcast.com

We're picking up some threads from the first episode, looking in greater depth at the strangeness of a delivery leadership role.

In the first half we return to that uncomfortable location for the CDO — sitting between each customer's needs and the objectives of your own business — and we discuss how it's more complicated still, because you also need to serve the teams that actually deliver client outcomes. Experts need the right opportunity to exercise their expertise, and it's the CDO's duty to create that space and guard it. We've talk over an example or two for that.

Later on, we look specifically at the strange, sometimes contradictory combination of skills and capabilities that a high performing delivery director should have. We talk over some of the fundamentals at a high level, many of which we'll return to in future episodes:

• High EQ
• Strong communication skills
• Diplomacy
• Strong organisational skills
• Outcome oriented
• Process driven
• Forecasting and capacity management
• Knowledge and skills sharing
• Strong sense of team — we’re doing this together
• Set standards, and hold people accountable to them

The very first episode of the Deliver That! podcast — a show about delivery leadership for projects, teams, and programs — the big concepts, real-life stories from the front line, and everything involved in the role of a Chief Delivery Officer.

In episode 1 we introduce the podcast and ourselves:

• What’s the reason for the podcast and what are we aiming to do with it?
• Who are we, Steve Hunton and Joe Baker?
• And what's the plan?

And then the heart of the discussion in this episode — what actually is a CDO, and why are we going to be talking about a Chief Delivery Officer here, rather than, say, a delivery principal or head of PMO or whatever? We're advocating for the role being seen as a executive level, CxO role for good reasons, which we talk about in this episode but is really the point of the podcast and will be what's covered in the discussions in all the episodes ahead.  

We also give a thumbnail sketch of what a CDO does, the primary focus and orientation in the role. But it's only broad brushstrokes really, coz this is what the show is about.

 

Deliver That! is a new podcast about project delivery leadership.

The big concepts, real-life stories from the front line, and everything involved in the role of a Chief Delivery Officer.

No filters. No fluff.

Just honest conversations about what happens in project and delivery leadership, and how big things really get done.