4 key takeaways from DeliverCon 2024.2
It can be difficult to share alternative perspectives, but well-informed challenges are essential to generate better solutions for clients
Over the last couple of years DeliverCon has been a regular fixture in our events calendar at dxw. A few of us delivery folk joined DeliverCon 2024.2 to learn, share and be inspired by our peers across the public sector. Here are our key takeaways.
- A new way to start the day 🌟
DeliverCon is an unconference, which means attendees develop the agenda at the start of the day. This usually involves standing at the front of a crowded room, sharing an idea you’d like to explore and seeing if you get enough cheers. It can be quite intimidating and means great ideas often aren’t heard.
I liked that DeliverCon used an alternative, inclusive approach that wasn’t based on confidence with public speaking. It involved writing down our response to the question “if you were the boldest version of yourself, what would you like to talk about?” and scoring each others’ ideas to find the topics we were collectively most interested in. I’ll definitely be stealing this technique to help my teams make certain decisions in future.
- The balance of the supplier and buyer dynamic 🤝
A few lines of thinking came up where people suggested that suppliers or delivery partners are often looking to upsell at all costs. Generally, this cynicism is not necessarily new, untrue or easy to avoid but it’s good to be reminded of the importance of balance in delivery of sales or commercial conversations. I find that a focus on building trust and relationships and maintaining integrity in your recommendations can help here. For example, we shouldn’t be encouraging clients to spend money on a discovery if it’s already abundantly clear that a different solution provides a better user experience. I have previously written about challenging the agile phases in this way to maximise value to clients.
- Going against the grain gets positively noticed 🌾
We found our respectful challenges to common assumptions around what it means to be agile or a delivery manager were well received. It can be difficult to share alternative perspectives, but well informed challenges are essential to generate better solutions for clients. It made me wonder if it would serve dxw well to be bold(er) and risky(er) in some of our proposals, demonstrating to potential clients how our alternative approaches could provide even more value to users in faster time.
- Control vs Influence – food for thought when defining scope for yourself ⭕️
Most delivery managers find it hard to summarise their role in a sentence. We’re often generalists that touch various areas and adapt to different contexts, exercising a slightly different set of skills accordingly. As a result, the scope of our work can be broad and hard to define. And it can be difficult to focus with so many different tasks on your plate.
A really nice thought came up in a session based on being great, which could help with this – know what you can control versus what you can influence. The latter can surface in conversations or 121s and is not necessarily anything additional to what we’re already doing. Influencing delivers value in a different way and can be more impactful than taking on the task yourself. It’s interesting to think about it intentionally – could you move some of your day-to-day tasks into the influence bracket? I’d be really interested to hear some examples. It also struck me that you might not recognise the coaching and influencing you’re doing until you read someone else defining it that way!
Conclusions/ summary
Although the scope of delivery managers is broad, it’s clear product development needs great delivery managers that challenge and adapt. DeliverCon is a great forum to help us keep exploring our role so we can continue to deliver best value to our clients.