Right-sized Governance P5: Portfolio Delivery | Is your delivery machine effective?
Written by Jonny Baber on
In our previous blogs on “Right-sized Governance”, we talked about the importance of effective Demand Management, Resource Management, and Governance & Assurance in making the right change investment decisions for your organisation. Collectively, these services help to ensure a change portfolio that is optimised for your business.
However, you still need to deliver that portfolio - but are you really confident your delivery machine is running as effectively as it should be? Many change management professionals will tell you the answer is to double down on traditional delivery standards such as those defined in the PRINCE2 framework, whilst others will tell you that the answer lies in a wholehearted adoption of more agile methodologies. Then there are the hybrid options such as SAFe, which although make sense on paper, often turn out to be overly academic and unactionable in practice.
Whilst we agree that the basic delivery disciplines that underpin these methodologies (and others) all have their place and can often co-exist successfully, we think the way these are implemented and policed is the real key to delivery success.
Time and again, we have seen an often-draconian enforcement of waterfall-based delivery standards that strangle the life out of delivery flexibility, or at the other end of the scale, a mad rush to embrace more “agile” ways of working without really understanding what that means to the wider delivery operating model.
At changemaker, we all come from delivery backgrounds and have experienced what it’s like at the sharp end of change delivery. We therefore recognise the importance of finding a way to bring your delivery community fully on-board with the wider change management approach (whatever that may be). There is no one-size fits all answer but the common factors in any successful implementation of a change delivery operating model are:
- Make it as simple, painless and value adding to your delivery team’s day jobs as possible.
- Ensure you have full buy-in to whatever operating model you adopt by taking the time to explain to your teams what you are doing and why you are doing it.
Get these two right, and you will reap the benefits of consistently high-quality delivery as a result.
Interested in finding out more?
Contact info@changemaker.org.uk or Jonny Baber, Principal Account Director - Change Delivery at jonny.baber@changemaker.org.uk.
Catch up with the full series:
Introduction to Right-sized Governance
Enterprise Resource Management
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