As we work primarily in the project delivery space, we are starting to see a shift away from buying in ‘pre-learned’ teams in the form of contingent workers and moves towards persistent team models. With this more permanent delivery structure, comes a shared learning and continuous improvement journey. We notice more clients bringing education agendas in house, as opposed to ticking off generic skills and education achievements from CV’s. So, how do you invest in your delivery capability the right way to help you execute more efficiently and save resources?

It’s nice to see a desire from clients to retain and nurture talent and to have conversations around how to attract a contingent worker into a permanent role. We see some obvious benefits in this approach, such as IP retention, delivery continuity, greater responsibility for benefits delivery (i.e. the team have an opportunity to stay and see the results of their efforts, often increasing personal investment) and the emergence of high performing teams.

Other less obvious benefits that we observe surfacing organically occur are as follows:

  • The stable team structure gives the opportunity for a long-range view of capacity. This gives organisations an opportunity for more informed strategic planning.
  • Individuals invest more in planning and strategy on a personal level as both become more relevant to individuals’ futures.
  • The persistent team has more knowledge shared with them, around departmental goals and objectives and enterprise strategy; we see this contribute to better delivery and decision making in terms of alignment and flex with competing objectives.
  • Teams start to achieve and create opportunities for greater collaboration at an enterprise level.
  • A shaping of the learning agenda as teams collectively identify knowledge gaps and seek ways to address these.
  • Increased personal investment in governance and process
  • More opportunity for continuous improvement as ways of working that don’t work become of more importance due to the increased longevity of roles

We are happy to see clients investing in people in this real way and believe that over time those seeking ways to invest in project people will certainly see improved delivery capability. Get in touch with us to find out our ways on how to align culture and delivery. Learn more about how we do this at our video here!