The specifics of how you deliver really doesn’t matter (to your executives)

I’ve worked in the delivery space for thirty years.

Over that time, I’ve seen delivery approaches rise and fall and wars about ways of working rage on. Frameworks, tooling, nomenclature, roles and rituals have changed, but one thing hasn’t. Most executives don’t care how you deliver as long as business objectives are met. The question they want answered is not which framework to pick but rather what they need to do to get their business results.

Anything else is just mechanics.

I’m not suggesting that executives shouldn’t want to know anything about how those results are produced. Such an “end justifies the means” mindset might encourage a command and control approach from delivery leaders. It is one thing to not know how your car engine works when you take it to a mechanic to be fixed but your car is not part of complex adaptive system the way your business processes and supporting applications are.

Leaders should understand why teams are organized in a certain way, how the members of those teams are feeling, how the decisions they make will affect business outcomes as well as the upstream and downstream implications of those decisions. They should know what technical debt is and how the decisions they make can affect that. They should also understand that they shouldn’t create walls between delivery and operations.

They should understand if the delivery targets they’ve set or the constraints they are imposing on teams are realistic. They need to understand what could go wrong but also how they could prevent those risks from being realized. And they must know how they can best use their power and influence to get their projects to succeed.

But whether you use framework A or B, call a delivery role X or Y, or follow a P or Q life cycle is really not that important to them. If they’ve come up through the ranks from delivery positions they might have some nostalgic interest in this but beyond that it really doesn’t matter to them.

So have your “my Kung Fu is better than your Kung Fu” arguments on social media platforms if that makes you happy. Just don’t expect your executive team to pick a side or to cheer from the sidelines.

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)