Organizations face a significant risk of diminished returns arising from poorly managed delivery initiatives. In the modern era we have the opportunity to utilize new tooling, technologies and ways of working to avoid potential pitfalls in the delivery space – but these different avenues can also be a minefield and prove at once confusing and challenging for teams.
“58% of project practitioners have had a project fail in the past year [and] only 34% of organizations mostly or always complete projects on time”1
I’ve long studied and practiced delivery in a variety of domains, with the early stages of my working life spent in technology delivery before my experiences and expertise extended further into business, operations and regulatory delivery across financial services.
It has been a privilege and character-building to witness and emulate the expert delivery practitioners I have had the good fortune to work with over the years. I learnt that delivering quality products and experiences – on time, reliably, and at a high cadence – is not just a matter of how we combine technology with process.
It is also a matter of the mindsets, behaviors and principles each of us applies every day, not least during the toughest periods of any delivery cycle – be that a sprint, a project, or a portfolio. Individually and as a team, these qualities can be the key difference in achieving a successful outcome.
To deliver results at the quality and velocity required, here are ten golden rules of delivery to impress upon your teams:
1. Deliver on your promises
Delivering any piece of work late or below the required quality will inevitably erode your personal credibility and wider trust in your ability to deliver the outcomes asked for. Meeting your promises requires:
2. Move and act as one team
Teams that pull together in one direction, and with one voice, will always be better positioned to succeed than those that fall prey to internal strains or frictions. Of course, the reality of delivery is never that simple, so to act as one team:
3. Strive for the exceptional, surpass expectations
From the very beginnings of discovery through to landing your product via the DevSecOps pipeline, always strive for improvement beyond the expectation. As three-time Olympic breaststroke gold medal winner Adam Peaty has noted: “The extra 10% around the edges is what makes the difference, those little details to improve by increments.…Each morning I get up and ask myself, ‘How can I be better than yesterday?”2
At a team level, you can achieve improvements and surpass expectations by learning fast and adapting quickly. Leverage retro ceremonies to improve as a team and conduct pre-mortems to mitigate against downstream pitfalls. Always keep asking “how might we…?” to break away from conventional thinking.
4. Understand and report your project’s true status
We have all been on a call or in a meeting where the topic of conversation turns to whether your initiative/epic was at Red, Amber or Green status. Such discussions will not be productive unless you and your teammates have a common understanding of what ‘on-track’, ‘at risk’, and ‘delayed’ mean in a quantitative sense.
This is where objectives and key results (OKRs) come in. Use them to track tangible and meaningful metrics that tell you how far you have progressed versus where you said you would be. This can be anything from the number of services deployed to number of design workshops completed. It all counts and enables you to measure your project’s true status.
Also, never trivialize the finer details or ‘minor’ issues. Many so-called smaller issues can snowball into a big issue if you do not surface them transparently and proactively escalate them and/or act to resolve them.
5. Completion must be unquestionable
I recall being in one collaboration space when two delivery practitioners had the following exchange:
Practitioner 1: “Are the new business processes signed off?”
Practitioner 2: “They are signed off, subject to some minor amendments.”
Practitioner 1: “They are either signed off or not signed off. Which is it?”
Practitioner 2: “They are signed off, but there are just a couple of things that need...”
Practitioner 1: “Stop right there. That means they are not signed off.”
Finished means finished – you have satisfied all the criteria in your definition of done, your sign-off process, or your entry/exit criteria, and most importantly you have the evidence logged and stored to prove it. It pays huge dividends downstream when you and your team enforce and adhere to this evidence-based approach to recording results. Always remember that your record of results may all be audited or investigated years later, so ensure your records are robust, accurate and complete.
6. Adopt an owner mindset, take control
When things get tough during a delivery initiative, the easiest thing to do is to point to another individual or team that did not finish their tasks by the date you and your team needed. This approach is disastrous for delivery. Each individual, and all teams collectively, have to take full ownership of any backlog and the dependencies within it:
7. Embrace change with calmness and objectivity
Change is going to come, and it will come at you and your team thick and fast. Inevitably some colleagues will be apprehensive or resistant to the latest change but embrace it yourself and support your team to do the same.
Often the hardest changes to navigate are organizational or environmental – when the world around your delivery initiative is being reformed. To thrive from these moments of change, there is a calmness and objectivity needed from you and your team’s leadership. Putting it another way, be the eye of the storm, don’t be the whirlwind.
8. Be curious, enjoy learning
Every delivery initiative is an opportunity to learn something new. As one of my university lecturers said: “I always learn more than I teach” – and this inquisitive mindset has served me well over the years. Learning and personal development can occur on project as part of your day-to-day work or as an adjunct to your primary role in the team (and ideally both).
To achieve this, set aside some time – whether 10 minutes a day or an hour a week – that is purely devoted to learning something new.
9. Take pride, have fun
On the pride side of this equation, Steve Jobs probably put it the best when he said one of his team’s goals at Apple was “to make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends”.3 A delivery team that takes this sort of pride in their work is setting itself up to deliver quality outcomes and products.
10. Deliver on your promises
So important that it has to be mentioned twice.
CONCLUSION
Delivery is rarely straightforward and often very hard. So it is important – both personally and as a team – to instill and maintain the mindset that delivery is about solving a series of connected issues. When the team have solved all or enough of those issues, you will have delivered the desired result.
Along that journey the team will need to have each other’s back, act as one, and build a camaraderie and a relish for the challenge at hand to make the experience simultaneously fun and rewarding. It is this individual and collective commitment both to achieving the desired outcome and to supporting each other that is the hallmark of a high-performing team. Tools, technology and processes are all enablers of delivery initiatives, but it is our mindsets and behaviors that will prove the difference between success and failure.
REFERENCES
1 https://xergy.com/proteus-blog/project-management-in-2024/
2 Peaty, A. “The Gladiator Mindset”, 2021, Quercus Editions Ltd., London
3 https://thoughtcatalog.com/katee-fletcher/2020/10/steve-jobs-quotes/
