Somebody owns the date. Who is running the delivery?
Mobilisation, the plan, the PMO, the dependencies and the suppliers: the machinery that turns an approved programme into delivered work. Built properly, run properly, and handed over so it keeps running without us.
Accountability is not capability, and appointing one does not create the other
Most programmes that go wrong have somebody accountable. What they do not have is a delivery function underneath that person: a plan built once and maintained, dependencies that are mapped rather than remembered, a RAID log that is worked, and reporting that means the same thing in month six as it did in month one.
That is this role. Where the Transformation Director answers for the outcome at board level, this builds and runs the machine that produces it, under your sponsor or across a portfolio where no single programme justifies its own director.
It is deliberately the less senior-sounding of the two, and it is the one more organisations actually need. Naming an owner is a decision. Delivery capability is a build.
The programme is approved, staffed and somehow not moving
The plan lives in three places and agrees in none
A slide deck for the board, a spreadsheet for the workstreams, and a tool nobody has opened since mobilisation. Each is out of date in a different direction.
Dependencies surface as surprises
They are not unknown. They are known by individuals, separately, and nothing in the process makes two of those people compare notes before the week it matters.
Reporting has become a production
Three days a month go into a pack that tells the steering committee what it already believes. The status has not changed colour in a quarter.
Your suppliers each run their own plan
Two integrators and a software vendor, three delivery methods, three definitions of done, and no single view of what is actually landing when.
The PMO is a person, not a function
One capable individual holds the whole thing together. When they are on leave the programme is genuinely less well run, and everybody knows it.
Mobilisation never really finished
Delivery started before governance, tooling and the baseline were in place, and six months on nobody can say what the programme was originally committed to.
Four pieces of machinery, built and run
Mobilisation & Baseline
Scope, sequencing, the critical path and a baseline that is written down while it is still true, so that six months later there is something to measure the change requests against.
The PMO Itself
Standing it up where there is none, or repairing one that has become a reporting department. Cadence, controls, tooling and the RAID discipline, sized to the programme rather than to a methodology.
Suppliers & Third Parties
One plan across every party delivering, one definition of done, and progress reported by somebody who is not being measured by it. Where that turns commercial it meets the procurement practice.
Reporting Worth Reading
A status that carries information rather than reassurance, produced in hours rather than days, and early enough that the steering committee can still act on what it says.
A PMO that leaves when we leave was never a PMO
The standard failure in this category is a delivery function that runs beautifully for the length of the engagement and evaporates the week after. It was never built. It was performed, by people who took it with them.
So the handover is designed at the start rather than negotiated at the end: your people named into the roles from the first month, the controls documented as they are built rather than reconstructed afterwards, and coaching as part of the work instead of a workshop at the close. The measure of the engagement is what still runs six months after the invoice stops.
Before you add another project manager
If your PMO lead resigned tomorrow, what would stop working?
If the answer is a long list, you do not have a delivery function. You have one person doing an excellent job of concealing that you do not.
How long does the monthly report take to produce?
Effort is a decent proxy for how much of the plan is being reconstructed by hand each month rather than maintained as it changes.
Who holds the one plan that includes your suppliers?
If each party maintains their own and someone merges them for the pack, the merge is the plan, and it is only as good as the last time it was done.
What were you committed to at approval?
Not what is in scope now. What was signed off. If nobody can produce it quickly, the baseline has gone, and with it any way of telling change from drift.
Where this sits
When you need an owner, not a function
Where the problem is that no single person answers for the programme landing, that is a different and more senior seat.
See the Transformation DirectorThe practice behind this role
Operating model, decision rights and the structure a programme has to land into if the change is going to stick.
See Business & Operating ModelWhat this has delivered
Programmes rebooted rather than re-planned, deployment cycles cut from months to weeks, and a quality capability built and handed over.
See the track recordTake the Agile Delivery Assessment
Not whether you run the ceremonies, but whether they change what ships. Seven areas, rated on screen, with a PDF if you want it.
Start the assessmentBring us the programme that is staffed and still not moving
An approved programme with no delivery function under it, a PMO that has become a reporting department, or three suppliers each running their own plan. A direct conversation about what is actually missing.