Hiring a dedicated delivery excellence leader will set you apart by aligning your technology investment with your business processes.
No business today operates without making substantial investments in business technology. However, leaders often have little or no understanding of how their business processes use technology and how that technology can drive competitive advantage. They need resources dedicated to delivering maximum value for their investment to achieve growth and success. In recent years, many organizations have created delivery excellence roles to meet this growing need. These leaders help seamlessly execute technology projects and adhere to best practices. They also work to keep technology architecture and business processes cohesive to deliver the most value to the organization.
In this blog, we demonstrate that without such dedicated resources, organizations will face several significant challenges. But with a dedicated delivery excellence leader in place, your organization can use your technology investment more effectively to maintain your competitive edge.
Before we begin, let’s define “delivery excellence” and how you can track your progress toward it.
How to Define and Measure Delivery Excellence
Every business is in the delivery business. Whether they produce widgets, develop software, or provide services, consumers judge companies by how quickly and how well they can deliver their products.
However, defining “delivery excellence” is more challenging. One barrier is that delivery excellence is a north star to guide you, not a one-time achievement. The day will never come when you can declare you have reached your final destination. It will always be a moving target.
But, you can define measures to mark continuous improvement toward delivery excellence. You are probably already collecting those metrics.
Customer satisfaction — whether measured through company surveys, point-of-sale conversations, or third-party monitoring companies — may be the most important. Retaining customers, earning their repeat business, and making them your brand ambassadors is a recipe for growth.
Other metrics that contribute to customer satisfaction include:
- Speed of delivery – an important factor in most customers’ purchasing decisions.
- Product quality – leads to repeat business and bolsters your brand.
- Cost efficiency – helps you maintain competitive pricing for customers.
You can compare these metrics against industry benchmarks to set ambitious but achievable targets for improvement. Then, monitor these metrics to set your company up for continuous improvement and stay ahead of competitors — one of a delivery excellence lead’s many goals.
Understanding the Delivery Excellence Role
The delivery excellence leader is a strategic business and technology professional who oversees the entire project lifecycle, from initiation to closure. The role creates business requirements, selects technology solutions that augment existing technology architecture, ensures that business data flow remains intact, and aligns with business stakeholders on each technology solution.
Once the technology aligns with users and business objectives, this leader can establish and enforce project management methodologies, ensure adherence to quality standards, and drive continuous improvement initiatives.
Because the delivery excellence leader has such a broad range of important responsibilities, people chosen for it need a unique combination of business acumen, technical expertise, project management skills, and a deep understanding of the organization’s business objectives. Specifically, they should be adept at identifying inefficiencies, analyzing data, and implementing process improvements.
Finally, because they bridge various stakeholders, functional business leaders, technology leaders, and executive leadership, delivery excellence specialists must communicate effectively while aligning project goals with organizational priorities.
Touching so many parts of the business, the delivery excellence leader is a key addition to your team. Before considering the benefits of investing in such a position, let’s consider the risks of not creating this dedicated role in your company.
The Risks of Not Having This Role in Your Continuous Improvement Plan
Without a dedicated delivery excellence leader, your organization will struggle to deliver highly integrated business technology solutions, maintain data integrity throughout the business process, and create highly efficient business process flows that deliver competitive growth.
Additionally, business technology projects will likely be inconsistent, leading to missed deadlines, budget overruns, and projects that continually fail to meet desired outcomes.
Another significant risk is investing in technology that does not align with business objectives. Your new technology may speed up a process. Still, if you don’t understand the role that process plays in producing your product or how it interacts with other processes, the additional speed might be more of a problem than a solution. Similarly, your technology may provide a lot of data, but you need data that drives smarter business decisions instead of distracting employees from their goals.
A delivery excellence leader avoids these risks and proactively addresses them, positioning you for more impactful and successful business technology service delivery.
For example, your delivery excellence leader can work with your functional and technology leaders to create a continuous delivery mindset within your organization. Such a mindset helps organizations stay agile and adapt to changing business requirements.
Finally, when project objectives align with business goals and clear communication about organizational goals, the result is increased stakeholder satisfaction for customers and employees. Those stronger relationships build trust within the organization, setting you up for even greater success.
Conclusion
Today’s competitive business landscape requires excellent delivery of high-quality business technology services, capabilities and projects. The delivery excellence leader emerges as a critical component for organizations seeking to optimize their technology investments, deliver higher quality business operations, enable consistent data-driven decisions, drive continuous improvement, and achieve successful project outcomes.
By embracing this specialized role, you can streamline business processes, enhance stakeholder satisfaction, and use ever-changing technology to deliver sustainable business growth to create a competitive edge.
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