Delivery Transformation for COOs
- Darren Emery
- Oct 27
- 6 min read
Why the Real Work Starts After the Frameworks
Most “delivery transformations” fail before they begin - not because of technology, but because leadership starts with the wrong question.
The typical question is: “How do we make our teams more agile?”
The better question is: “How do we build a system that reliably converts strategic intent into customer outcomes?”
That’s the heart of delivery transformation for any COO. It’s not about implementing a framework. It’s about designing an operating model that makes strategy flow.
And that makes the COO’s role uniquely pivotal: because only operations sits at the junction of strategy, delivery, and reality.
Beyond Busy: The System Design Failure
Every large organisation eventually faces the same realisation: your delivery engine is too busy to deliver. Teams are overloaded, priorities change weekly, and metrics tell you what happened, not why.
According to McKinsey, fewer than 30% of large-scale transformations achieve their intended outcomes, even when senior leaders are fully engaged. Meanwhile, years of research - including DORA - have shown that a small set of technical delivery measures such as lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, and time to restore are powerful predictors of organisational performance.
But these only tell part of the story. Real delivery performance lives across four dimensions: Speed, Quality, Value, and Culture. You can ship fast but still deliver little value. You can have high quality but a disengaged culture. A high-performing COO pays attention to all four: because transformation fails the moment one dominates the rest.
And if the data says delivery capability drives performance, and we still can’t deliver, then the problem isn’t knowledge. It’s system design.
Or more precisely: leadership design.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”- W. Edwards Deming
That’s why delivery transformation for COOs must start with one principle: fix the system, not the people.
It’s not that people aren’t trying, it’s that the system they’re in won’t let them succeed.
A story: the morning everything changed
A short while ago, I was asked to help a mid-sized investment firm that had spent 12 months on a major technology overhaul and had “too many projects and not enough progress to show for it.”
The pattern was familiar. Strategy existed as a collection of PowerPoint decks and under-communicated “key priorities”. Every executive had their own “top priority.”
Delivery had become a triage centre: it had inherited a nation of “projects” - roadmaps that were really budgets disguised as strategy: overloaded, under-aligned, and drowning in “urgent” work. The execs would nod in boardroom meetings while teams three floors down fought for test environments and clarity of purpose.
One morning, during what was meant to be a routine delivery update, I paused the meeting and asked a simple question:
“What will actually change for the customer in six weeks if we stop everything else and focus here?”
Silence. Then, one of the product leads said quietly, “We could reduce onboarding time by 30%.”
In that moment, we moved from wishful thinking to measurable intent.
That single shift - from outputs to genuine outcomes - did more for momentum than any framework rollout could have.
It became our focus. We restructured around that single outcome: cross-functional team, clear measures, and no competing asks. Within eight weeks, onboarding friction had dropped sharply.
The exec team had a tangible result, a marketing story to sell. And more importantly, they stopped micro-managing.
That day, we learned something powerful: delivery transformation doesn’t start with new ceremonies or KPIs. It starts with leadership choosing what not to do.
The outside analogy: the railway timetable
Imagine a national railway network. You have trains (teams), shared track (infrastructure), and a timetable (strategy).
If each train decides when and where to go, the network collapses. But if you over-control every driver’s movements, you create gridlock.
A great COO is like a depot manager: responsible for the system that keeps the network moving - maintenance, signals, and recovery plans when things go wrong. The job isn’t to drive the trains. It’s to make sure they can run on time, recover quickly, and deliver passengers where they’re supposed to go.
That’s delivery transformation: the design of the network, not the driving of the trains. It’s less about how fast any single train moves, and more about how predictably the whole system flows.
And when the signals fail, no amount of speed saves you. The network only works when the system works.
The new idea: Strategic Delivery Contracts
Most organisations have project charters, SLAs, or PI plans. Few have what I call Strategic Delivery Contracts: simple, outcome-focused agreements that connect strategy to execution in real terms.
A Strategic Delivery Contract (SDC) is a short, written pact between leadership and a delivery team that defines:
The outcome: The measurable change we expect in the next 6–12 weeks.
The measures: Both business (e.g. adoption, revenue impact) and technical (e.g. lead time, stability).
The boundaries: What we won’t do this cycle.
Leadership commitments: What senior stakeholders will unblock (funding, decisions, access).
Team commitments: What will be delivered, demonstrated, or learned.
The power of the SDC is that it makes the implicit explicit. It turns vague strategic ambition into a concrete, inspectable agreement; one that forces both sides to take ownership of outcomes, not activity.
And unlike typical governance documents, it’s written in plain English. One page. One outcome. One set of promises. It’s the antidote to governance theatre - turning leadership intent into something teams can actually act on.
Why this philosophy works
The delivery philosophies I subscribe to share a few common beliefs:
That outcomes, not output, are the real measure of progress.
That systems and constraints determine behaviour far more than individual effort.
And that strategy is a set of choices, not a list of initiatives.
Delivery transformation for COOs is where these principles become operational. It’s where leadership philosophy meets organisational physics. It’s not about “going agile.” It’s about aligning structure, measures, and behaviour to make intent flow without constant firefighting.
When a COO leads transformation from this mindset, delivery stops being a black box. It becomes a predictable, improvable system.
Tangible steps for COOs
Here’s how to start, pragmatically:
1. Baseline your delivery capability
Before you change anything, measure it.If you can’t produce your DORA metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, time to restore), start there. It’s your system’s diagnostic chart - not a vanity dashboard.
2. Introduce Strategic Delivery Contracts
Pilot SDCs on one or two high-value initiatives.Keep them visible and time-boxed. Hold weekly exec check-ins to review progress and unblock leadership-owned constraints.
3. Shift KPIs from activity to outcome
Stop rewarding delivery volume. Reward impact.Swap “features delivered” for “customer behaviour changed” and link incentives accordingly.
4. Establish a ‘Depot’ team for shared reliability
Create a small internal unit responsible for the health of shared delivery infrastructure - CI/CD, observability, environments, and developer experience. It’s the silent backbone of your operating model.
5. Shorten governance loops
Move decision-making closer to the teams doing the work.If a decision takes more than five working days, fix the process before you fix the team.
6. Make the cost of delay visible
Quantify the cost of each competing priority and show it to your leadership peers.Clarity beats persuasion: numbers make trade-offs real.
7. Coach, don’t checklist
Leadership behaviour drives delivery culture.Model curiosity, not certainty. When teams are stuck, ask “What do you need from me to move faster?” instead of “Why isn’t this done yet?”
The 90-day transformation targets
Set short, credible goals. For example:
Reduce deployment lead time by 30% for one product line.
Complete one end-to-end initiative under a Strategic Delivery Contract and report business impact.
Eliminate the three highest recurring system blockers surfaced by your Depot team.
These aren’t grand transformation milestones, they’re simply proof points. And proof points create momentum.
Governance made simple
Every major initiative should fit on one page:
Element | Description |
Initiative Name | Clear and concise |
Outcome Statement | What will change for customers or the business in 6-12 weeks |
Measures | One technical + one business metric |
Leadership Commitments | Top three unblocking actions |
Team Commitments | Key deliverables or learning goals |
Review Cadence | Weekly progress and decisions |
This isn’t bureaucracy. It’s clarity on a single sheet of paper: the most underused leadership tool in delivery.
If you can’t explain it on one page, it’s not strategy - it’s confusion.
The political reality
Transformation is never neutral.
Functions that have long controlled priorities or budgets will resist systemic change. Vendors will lobby for their frameworks. Governance committees will claim they “already do this.”
That’s fine. The point of a Strategic Delivery Contract isn’t consensus. It’s clarity.
When trade-offs are explicit, you can lead. When they’re not, the system leads you.
Closing thought: Leadership as the operating system
Delivery transformation for COOs isn’t a methodology project. It’s a leadership project.
You can buy frameworks, hire consultants, and invest in new tooling. But if your leadership operating system still rewards busyness over focus, and certainty over learning, the system won’t change.
Fix the system. Measure the flow. Choose your outcomes carefully.
Because in the end, frameworks don’t transform companies - leaders who can think in systems do.
And that’s the part most transformations forget - the agility that matters starts at the top.
