How often is there a mismatch between sales and delivery?

How often do we deliver something fundamentally different from what we thought was agreed with a client?

It’s rare for the sales process to include much time from the delivery team. It inflates the cost of sales, and unsuccessful pitches feel significantly more risky. So is it worth it?

Is it worth it?

For me, absolutely. Sales teams aren’t always able to consider the risk that’s baked into the projects they sell without experienced members of delivery. There has to be a better approach that isn’t many times more expensive.

I see this reduction of project risk, and the multiplying effect on team and client engagement as an investment in the future. An acknowledgment that project failure and client churn is significantly more expensive than bringing forward discussions about project delivery. Even if some projects never happen.

What would this early involvement look like?

Start with the ‘why’. Why now, why this, what will success look like and how will we measure it?

Stand-ups are used by most creative and digital agencies. Teams have daily meetings where they align around their progress, challenges and discuss what’s coming next.

At least 15 minutes a day is spent on those calls. The whole team attends. Listening is the primary activity for attendees. It shouldn’t be controversial to state that the time should be used wisely.

But what does wisely mean? Well for me it means that it’s a good use of time for all who attend. From the most experienced to the least experienced team member. No matter what the role. Everyone should walk away believing they benefited from the call.

The focus of these stand-ups however is all too often a turn taking exercise where an individual’s status is shared. They read out information that is stored in accessible digital tools that the team can access.

What if stand-ups were about planning instead of reporting?

The premise of all my work is impact. Agencies look to me for swift solutions to urgent problems. There is rarely time available to building rapport with a team. I have to build trust rapidly as I go.

And that’s not a simple challenge. The approach isn’t possible without a minimal level of trust, but I’ve yet to justify specific time for trust building.

How quickly can I get from meeting a team for the first time, to having their commitment to experiments aimed at improving shared ways of working?

It’s been an interesting challenge finding out.

I’ve used a similar approach a few times now when meeting a new team. I’m putting it out in the world as another opportunity to review it for potential improvements, and to open it up to feedback from those who have relevant experiences and insights.

Most agency teams hate retrospectives. The hour or more spent reviewing the sprint or project they’ve just completed doesn’t do what it promises, and the delivery team can often think of 100 better things to use their time on.

I realised this several years ago. Retrospectives are about a team inspecting current ways of working and adapting them to remove the failures or impediments, but who they’re not great for is:

• Agencies who change teams around often (dynamic teaming / fluid teaming)
• Teams who haven’t worked together long
• Teams who haven’t experienced success at improving their own approach to work

Even when the session goes well, the outputs of retrospectives are often unwieldy, badly defined and so nobody wants to take ownership of the actions.

The actions themselves are never as important as the endless billable work, and so nobody encourages the changes to happen — unless something falls over / fails badly.

The alternative is the micro retrospective. It helps teams who aren’t currently achieving ongoing improvement to dip their toe in the water and experience success with it.

They may then move on to a more detailed form of ongoing improvement once they build the muscle up.

I wrote more about micro retrospectives on the Agency Tactics Substack. I’d love to know what you think.