Who owns delivery improvement?

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.

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The Move to Pods, Squads or Workstreams

At some point, many agencies start thinking about pods. Not because things are failing, and usually not because leadership is deliberately trying to redesign delivery. More often, it happens after a period of growth where the work is good, the team is capable, and clients are happy, but delivery begins to feel heavier than it used to.

Projects start overlapping more often, and leaders find themselves pulled into multiple streams of work at the same time. Planning takes longer than expected, even when the work itself is familiar. Clients begin to sense uncertainty earlier in projects, not because the team lacks capability, but because coordination has become harder.

The agency is growing. The delivery model hasn’t caught up yet.

That is when pods begin to feel like the natural next step. Splitting the team into smaller groups promises clearer ownership, parallel delivery, and less coordination overhead. The idea is simple enough to feel low risk, particularly when the intent is not transformation but relief.

And often, it works.

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What Are We Awarding Anyway?

Lego figures holding a trophy stand in front of gold lighting

There are more agency awards than ever.

More categories. More ceremonies. More tables to buy. More reasons to attend.

And somewhere along the way, it becomes reasonable to ask:

What are we awarding anyway?

Because when you look closely, the volume starts to dilute the meaning. Not always, but often enough that agency leaders are weighing the effort, cost, and value with more scrutiny than before.

This is not really about whether awards are good or bad. It is about whether they still make sense. And when they actually serve the agency, rather than the other way around.

The growing weight of awards

For established agencies, awards tend to appear at a particular stage.

You have strong clients. The work is good. The team is proud of what they are producing.

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I live in the gaps

Not the obvious ones. The quieter spaces where something is missing, but the system still appears to function. Where people are busy, well intentioned, and doing their best, while quietly compensating for something nobody has named.

One of those gaps became very clear in a process I was asked to spend some time with recently.

The business had done what it believed was the responsible thing. Time and care had gone into producing a detailed specification internally. Requirements were thought through. Edge cases captured. Decisions signed off. On paper, it looked solid.

And yet, the same questions kept resurfacing. Clarifications. Reinterpretations. Small misunderstandings that did not feel serious enough to escalate, but persistent enough to slow things down. Nothing dramatic. Just enough friction to make the work heavier than it needed to be.

It would have been easy to pin that on execution. Or communication. Or individuals not reading closely enough. That is usually where these conversations drift.

But sitting with it for a while, something else felt off.

The specification was doing its job inside the business. It created confidence. It reduced perceived risk. It allowed decisions to move forward. Once it crossed the boundary to the delivery team, though, it became something different. A document to interpret. To infer from. To work around.

No one had failed. The gap sat between contexts.

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Embedding AI: High value and low value client interactions

photo of girl laying left hand on white digital robot

I keep noticing how much effort agencies put into every client interaction.
Everything is treated as high stakes, high touch, and deeply personal.

It comes from a good place. No team wants to feel like they are giving clients a thin or automated experience.

But over time I’ve started to question whether all of that effort is actually valuable.

Some interactions genuinely benefit from care and judgement. Others mainly need to be accurate and delivered when promised.

When those two types of interaction get treated the same way, it usually causes problems. Senior people get buried in admin, and the moments that really need judgement get squeezed.

I see this most clearly in delivery work.

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