The flexible digital and creative agency project delivery framework.
A project delivery toolkit that works in any agency context. Ensuring repeatable success, no matter who your clients are, or what needs they have. This page introduces the framework and connects you to deeper guidance, a practical checklist, and the Predictable Projects model.
It helps agency leadership and technology teams build a predictable, accountable delivery culture that supports your commercial goals. It also includes an approach to productisation for agencies, showing how reusable components and dependable ways of working can support bespoke delivery without reducing creativity or flexibility.
A hybrid methodology
It’s a hybrid methodology specifically created to enable consistent digital and creative agency project success.
It acknowledges that project delivery at a digital or creative agency has different challenges and pressures to product delivery. Fixed elements, stakeholder challenges, and shorter timelines for example.
Offering guidance for all types of scope, client and team. It accepts that fixed scope projects happen. It supports a waterfall delivery approach when suitable. It even pairs well with the core values of Agile.
It’s a foundational approach which is flexible enough to be implemented by any delivery team. While also encouraging them to personalise and evolve aspects of it for their specific needs.
It contains a powerful set of tools for every focus area. It’s suitable for any project and plays well with any delivery model.
With new or existing clients, whether they perceive your agency as supplier, vendor, expert, partner or consultant. Whether their thinking has reached the How, or the What, or even the Why.
Where scope is flexible or fixed, and requirements are simple, complicated, or complex.
Where your team is remote or co-located, and whether your teams’ members change often, or rarely.
Guidance and Support
In addition to the core project focuses, the framework also helps improve the wider system around delivery.
It includes guidance for, and support with:
- Management style
- Client onboarding
- Project roles and responsibilities
- Team dynamics
- Productisation
- Meetings and formats
- Productivity and quality
- Communication
Send me an email to chat about how your agency can get started.
Four Project Focuses
Tactical Delivery Habits contains four focuses. Align, Define, Deliver, Adapt.
These focuses guide us at the project level — beginning with sales, then project planning, delivery and completion — and are repeated during projects within each cycle, sprint, or release.
Align
This is where you create shared understanding and agree direction.
The first stage of any client relationship is alignment. It’s also relevent to every project and each project cycle. It includes the sales process and any early discovery, or prioritising and planning the next release.
- Ensures client engagement
- Balances and mitigates risk
- Builds trust on both sides
- Supports internal buy-in
Explore the Align focus in depth.
Define
This focus area turns your alignment into a working plan.
The planning stage. Bringing any existing scope, and including the outputs from the Align focus, we create a project plan that includes the work, the priorities, the risks, estimates and people.
- Creates a detailed plan to push against and aim for
- Allows for discovery and change
- Can be value-led, metric focused, or fixed
Explore the Define focus in depth.
Deliver
Here, the work gets done through predictable habits.
Where value is created and delivered. Using outputs from the Define focus, we make progress against our plan.
- Considered scope creep
- Encourages early and often delivery
- Emphases doing things early and ending well
Explore the Deliver focus in depth.
Adapt
This focus area turns experience into improvement.
A regular review of our ways of working. Changing focuses at the team, approach, and project level to ensure holistic inspect and adapt both during and between projects.
- Classic inspect and adapt benefits
- Considers dynamic teaming challenges
- Focuses on the approach and team, not individuals
Explore the Adapt focus in depth.
If you’d like to chat about all the ways you can benefit from this framework book a 25 minute intro call, or send me an email.
How the focuses reinforce each other
These focuses work best together. They form a cycle — one that helps teams deliver well, reflect on how they work, and improve with each project.
- Align creates shared understanding at the start of a relationship or cycle.
- Define translates that alignment into a clear, agreed plan.
- Deliver puts the plan into action with habits that drive momentum and clarity.
- Adapt uses reflection and feedback to improve the next round of alignment.
When all four are active, you reduce silos, avoid repeating mistakes, and create a more stable delivery rhythm across the whole agency.
Where this framework fits into delivery
You can apply the Tactical Delivery Habits framework across your existing delivery process without having to overhaul your ways of working.
Here are common points where it adds value:
- Before a project starts – use Align and Define to set expectations and reduce ambiguity.
- During project delivery – use Deliver habits to reduce drift and manage momentum weekly.
- At the end of a cycle, project or phase – use Adapt to reflect, learn, and improve the next iteration.
It’s also useful in:
- Retrospectives – to review how well each focus was handled
- Team onboarding – to give new joiners a shared model
- Delivery coaching – to identify gaps in process or practice
You don’t have to use it rigidly. Agencies often adopt it gradually, starting with one area and building from there.
Other Key Elements
Beyond the four project focuses, these elements strengthen delivery across different contexts.
Productisation
Create more scalable delivery by blending bespoke project work with reusable components and dependable approaches.
Learn more about productisation for agencies.
Roles
Tactical Delivery Habits encourages a flexible approach to team roles. Where a team or agency is small, roles can be thought of as hats which people wear for some or all of their day.
More than one person may split the responsibilities of a role, and a single person may play multiple roles in a project.
The key roles may use different names at your agency, and that’s ok. What’s important is that all the roles are catered for in some way.
Continue reading about Roles.
Feedback
Closely related to the Align focus, feedback is critical to project success because it ensures you have an ongoing understanding of what a client is hoping to achieve, and whether you’re doing a good job at delivering on it.
Regular checkins with the client stakeholders ensure you know whether they like where the project is headed, and feel good about the journey you’re guiding them on.
Where end users or customers are available to ask, feedback should also be sought from them to avoid only making decisions based on the opinions or consensus of stakeholders.
Consistent feedback helps keep projects aligned, surfaces changes early, and supports dependable outcomes.
FAQ
Why not call it a ‘Project Management Framework’?
The first reason is that project management, and the management of projects, are not the same thing. Project management suggests a person (a project manager) in charge of management of everybody and everything. That’s simply not the case in high performing teams.
The second reason is that this framework goes beyond the scope of standard project management. Successful agency projects need more than simply managing into existance. This framework aims to acknowledge and support that approach.
Can parts of the framework be implemented?
Yes. Although the framework includes guidance beyond the Four Project Focuses, the focuses themselves are self contained.
Many of the elements within each focus may also have individual merit for you. Tools, tips, techniques.
Is it suitable for an ad / marketing / software / design agency?
The framework focuses on client project delivery. It’s suitable anywhere that clients collaborate with a delivery team and there’s a clear start, middle and end to the work.
How much detail are you planning to share?
Breadth then depth. Initially the focus will be on explaining all areas of the framework. The level of detail will increase over time.
Starting with what it is and who it’s for. Then moving on to why it works. Finally some addition detail on how it all works.
Some aspects of delivery / workshops may not appear online any time soon, if ever, but I’ll have regular availability to work with agencies on implementation.
Those I work directly with, will of course have access to the complete framework.
Is specific software or certain tools required?
The framework includes guidance on defining and managing ‘the work’, but doesn’t mandate or even make recommendations for where any digital managing is done.
Does it include AI guidance or specifics?
Although the framework focuses on common disfunctions within agency project delivery, there are areas which benefit from AI and automation. Those areas have guidance and resources which center around AI and how it can support strong teams and profitable projects.
Can you help my agency implement it?
Yes! I support agencies with all sorts of project delivery challenges. The components of this framework are the core of that offer.
Want to apply this in your agency?
Most delivery frameworks stop at theory. This one’s built for action — but applying it well often takes a fresh perspective.
If your projects are unpredictable, or you’re seeing patterns repeat across teams, it’s worth talking.
I work with agency leaders to identify gaps, tune delivery habits and improve outcomes — without adding more process.
→ Book a short call to talk through your current challenges
→ Share a recent project, and I’ll help you map it to the framework
No sales pressure. Just a useful conversation about what’s getting in the way, and how to unblock it.