As a consultant you can’t simply arrive, grab a cup of tea and start making a team deliver work better.
And it’s not just about understanding the context either.
There are too many moving parts for that, and the people leading delivery are usually the ones with the least capacity to absorb change — and the most connections to everything else that needs to move.
Thanks to my experience I’m relatively quick to understand the challenges of a delivery team in agency delivery. I’ve done it many times, I have a solid set of questions and measures that I run through. I’ve learned that each situation is unique, but the patterns repeat more than people expect.
I can create a solid status report with input from all the key people within a week or two. When I read it back to stakeholders everybody nods and agrees and gets excited for the opportunities. In their eagerness to get started, they ask what comes next.
And then, almost immediately everything slows, because change is hard, and an agency prioritising that change over billability is harder.
The understanding and the planning are easier to work through. The action is always where things stall. Meaningful improvement in a delivery team requires the following elements.
- Alignment around the challenges
- Prioritisation of the more valuable work
- Time and patience
And 3 is where the wheels come off if your engagement is focused on working with an already overwhelmed team to ‘fix’ them.
Without leadership ring-fencing meaningful amounts of time and energy to the improvements which you cannot see on a spreadsheet, you often find you’re left with 15 minute blocks to discuss, agree and commit to tangible changes to ways of working.
What actually happens in those 15 minutes
A version of this work feels productive for quite a long time without actually being productive.
The conversations are good. The diagnosis is accurate. Everyone in the room can articulate what needs to change and why it matters. There’s genuine goodwill — from the team, from the consultant, often from leadership too. And then the session ends, and the week takes over, and the next session starts with a brief recap that quietly acknowledges nothing much moved in between.
Actions get noted but not owned. The difference matters more than it sounds. An action with a name attached to it and a date is a different object than a thing the group agreed would be a good idea. In constrained engagements, most things stay in the second category. There’s a vague collective intention, but nobody has specifically said they’ll do it, and nobody is following up to find out if they did.
Improvements get committed to in the room and quietly deprioritised outside it. Not through bad faith — through the entirely rational calculation that billable work has visible consequences and process improvement doesn’t. Missing a client deadline has a cost you can feel immediately. Failing to embed a better scoping approach has a cost that accumulates slowly and diffusely, and by the time it’s legible it’s been attributed to something else.
What tends to fill the space instead is strategy. Where are we, where do we want to be, how do we get there — these are genuinely useful questions, and answering them carefully has value. But strategy without tactics is a map with no route marked on it. After a while, the team has been shown the destination enough times that they could draw it themselves. What they don’t have is the next concrete step, a way of measuring whether they took it, or anyone checking whether they did.
The goodwill doesn’t disappear overnight. It thins. People show up slightly less prepared, contribute slightly less energy, leave slightly less convinced that this time will be different. By the time it’s visibly stalled, you’ve already lost several months of it.
Why the team can’t fix it from inside
Some of what drives that erosion is structural, and it sits above the team.
Delivery improvement has a particular quality in most agencies: it’s always the next priority. After this project. After this pitch. After this hire. The team might be aware of what needs to change. They might even agree on it. But agreement without protected time and resource is just a shared observation, and shared observations don’t change anything on their own.
Part of what makes it persist is that nobody really owns it. Delivery as a function tends to have a leader, but improving delivery as an ongoing endeavour usually doesn’t. It gets picked up by whoever has the most energy for it that quarter, shaped by whichever projects are causing the most friction, and quietly dropped when those pressures ease. The result is something that morphs constantly — different emphases, different language, different levels of urgency — without ever quite building on itself — and the nature of the work makes that easy to accept. Good delivery is mostly invisible.
When it works, the client is happy, the team feels calm, and nobody particularly notices why. The effort that went into getting there doesn’t show up in a case study or a credential. This makes it genuinely difficult to sustain energy around — not because people don’t care, but because the feedback loop is slow and the recognition is thin.
And underneath all of this is something worth being honest about: delivery improvement isn’t a project with a finish line. The agencies I’ve worked with that are furthest along haven’t solved it. They’ve built a more mature relationship with it. The team that needed intensive support two years ago now needs a different kind of attention. The process that worked well at thirty people starts to creak at fifty. What you’re investing in isn’t a fixed outcome — it’s the capacity to keep adapting.
That’s not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason why a capable team, working hard and meaning well, will hit a ceiling without someone outside the day-to-day holding a longer view. What changes it isn’t more effort from the team — it’s where the ownership sits.
What leadership involvement actually requires
The commitment isn’t complicated, but it is real.
It starts with time that’s genuinely protected — not squeezed between client calls or pushed when a project runs hot. A regular session, weekly or fortnightly, where the work of improving delivery is the only agenda. That sounds straightforward until the quarter gets busy, which is precisely when the temptation to defer it is strongest, and precisely when deferring it costs the most.
Beyond the calendar, there’s a harder ask. Leadership needs to own the outcome — not oversee it, not sponsor it from a distance, but carry it. Specific aspects of the work can be delegated: gathering feedback, running retrospectives, tracking metrics. The direction can’t be. Neither can the decision about whether progress is actually progress. That judgement needs to sit with someone who has enough context and enough authority to act on it.
Honest review is harder than it sounds. Not a status update where things are broadly fine, but a genuine read on what’s moving and what isn’t — including when the diagnosis points somewhere uncomfortable. Some of the bottlenecks in a delivery team trace back to decisions made above it. Timelines agreed without enough input. Resourcing stretched because it seemed manageable on paper. An engagement that can’t name those things will work around them instead, and working around them tends to produce limited results.
The most difficult part, in my experience, is the conversation about billability. There will be moments where meaningful improvement requires someone to decide that a team member’s time is better spent on a process change than on client work. That decision has a cost that’s visible on a spreadsheet. The benefit doesn’t appear there for a while. Leadership has to be willing to make that trade more than once, without immediate evidence that it was worth it.
That’s the actual shape of the commitment. It’s not onerous, but it does require returning to something, week after week, that rarely announces its own importance.
What becomes possible
When leadership holds the problem rather than delegates it, a few things become possible that weren’t before.
The most immediate is authority. A delivery lead or project manager can surface an issue, document it, escalate it. What they can’t do is decide that a client relationship absorbs a delay so the team can spend a sprint recalibrating how they scope work. That call sits higher up. When the person making that call is also the person invested in the improvement, it tends to get made differently.
Group ownership changes the dynamic in a subtler way. When a challenge belongs to one team, the rest of the organisation can observe it sympathetically from a distance. When leadership names it as theirs — a constraint on the business, not a performance issue in a department — other parts of the organisation tend to engage with it differently. Less spectating, more participation. The team stops being the patient.
Commitment is harder to describe but easy to recognise when it’s absent. It’s the difference between an engagement that produces a good report and one that produces a changed way of working. Reports are easy to commission and easy to shelve. Changes to how a business operates require someone with enough standing to make them stick when the pressure of a busy quarter pushes back — and enough investment in the outcome to care when it doesn’t.
None of this makes the work straightforward. But it does mean the work is pointed at something that can actually move.
So where does this leave me and my work?
What I’ve learned, slowly, is that arriving with the right questions and a good diagnostic isn’t the constraint. The constraint is what happens — or doesn’t — once everyone agrees on the answers. That’s what led me to change how I describe the work. Not the methodology, but the framing of where responsibility sits.
I now talk about partnering with leadership on delivery, rather than coaching a team through their challenges. The difference isn’t semantic. When leadership holds the problem, the dynamic is different — the team becomes part of the work rather than the subject of it, and the decisions that have always needed to be made at the top of the organisation are more likely to actually get made there.
It also changes what I’m accountable for. Which, in my experience, makes the whole thing more honest.
There’s a version of this that becomes self-sustaining. When an organisation genuinely internalises ongoing improvement as part of how it operates — not a project, not a response to a problem, but a standing value — leadership no longer needs to play the active role I’ve described.
Teams develop the judgment to diagnose and adapt without waiting for direction from above. The work I do becomes less necessary, and that’s the whole point. The engagements I find most satisfying aren’t the ones that run longest. They’re the ones where, at some stage, the organisation stops needing someone like me to hold the thread.