So you've got a vision but is everyone clear on who shapes the strategy, who delivers the work, who enables the change to land successfully and who realises the benefits once it has?
Impatient for the so‑what? Here it is... but do read to the end else you'll miss all the good stuff :)
👉 Accountability for delivery and benefits should sit with operational leaders in the C-suite
Most organisations fumble it, some get it completely wrong and a few get it right after several iterations. In my 30 years consulting I've found myself with a ring side seat too many times to count which has enabled me to distill the critical success factors and where it's at risk of falling apart.
People don't care about governance and RACI because it feels a waste of time, until they realise accountability is diffused, progress is opaque and everyone is playing the blame game and by then, it's too late for continuous improvement and a full do-over is likely necessary.
C-suite leaders will want someone, somewhere to be “on top of it” but often have slopey shoulders themselves. Having a single throat to choke, as the Americans like to say, is popular but the reality is transformation is a team game not a solo activity.
So how do you go about structuring your organisation so it can actually deliver on its strategic ambitions and not just write them down and hope for the best? This article came about because of a recent conversation that prompted me to reflect on the deeper principles of organisational design required to build a high‑performing transformation function—one that is integrated into the wider organisation rather than bolted on or treated as a separate machine.
👉 The Strategy or Change team’s power isn’t in owning delivery; it’s in designing the system, shining a light on progress and gaps and enabling others to succeed.
1. Successful transformation and the 4 key functions
For an organisation o turn vision into meaningful outcomes over time, four key functions need to be in harmony:
- Strategy: deciding what matters and why
- Defined success outcomes and measures that influence chance of success
- Clear focal points of the 3-5 things that matter most
- An approach with appropriate risk/reward balance for the mission
- Delivery: doing the work of building the outputs
- Getting stuff done on a day to day, week to week basis
- Managing resources, risks and dependencies
- Hitting milestones and operational metrics along the way
- Change: Preparing the organisation to be ready to catch and operate in the new work
- Supporting people, processes, and structures
- Surfacing tensions and constraints
- Helping teams mature their ways of working
- Operations: Running the business today while enabling the business you want tomorrow
- Owning day-to-day performance and service delivery both in the As-Is and To-Be worlds
- Keeping the lights on, maintaining SLA's and juggling local priorities
- Ensuring the design of what's delivered will enable them to work effectively
👉 Operations is where strategy ultimately becomes reality. It is the home of sustained accountability: the place where benefits are realised, culture is reinforced and new practices either stick or get abandoned.
2. Strategy and change are enabling functions
Strategy exists to shape direction, frameworks, prioritisation, governance, and organisational design. Change exists to prepare the organisation, support adoption, and build the human and structural readiness required to make strategy real. Confusing the two weakens both.
Strategy and change are often spoken about together, indeed its normal in many organisations for them to sit under the same C Suite member but they are not the same thing. They are better understood as two pillars of a temple: standing side by side, supporting the same roof, serving complementary but distinct purposes. Remove one, and the structure is weakened. Fuse them together and the roof loses balance and begins to warp.
The temptation is to collapse the two pillars into one, merging all their responsibilities. It feels efficient. It feels tidy. It feels helpful. It is wrong. It is just as problematic when the two pillars stand apart without connection, each unaware of what the other is doing, i've seen that movie before and it ends badly for everyone.
Strategy and change should remain distinct, strong and in constant harmony with independent mandates but interdependent purpose.
2.1 What the strategy team should do
Position the strategy function as an enabling, system-shaping team whose core responsibilities are to:
- Build and maintain a strategic planning framework
- Three-year objectives and success measures
- Clear in-year priorities and trade-offs
- A simple, repeatable planning cycle
- Facilitate strategic reviews and governance
- Are we doing the right things?
- Are we doing them in the right way?
- Are the right people accountable?
- Support organisational design and change
- Help redesign functions to align with strategy
- Shape value streams and portfolios of work
- Intervene short-term to stabilise, not to own
Think of them as the team that keeps the organisation honest about its strategy, not the team that quietly takes on everyone else’s work.
2.2 What the strategy team should not do
- Should not own delivery resources for major initiatives
- Should not be the de facto home for project managers
- Should not become the team everyone calls when “we need to get this done”
Because the moment you do that, the rest of the organisation unconsciously or even deliberately lets go of ownership and absolves itself from any and all responsibility.
2.3 But what about the PMO?
PMO supports the governance of the delivery but it's role is not to speak on behalf of delivery or operations but to create neat slides. Strategy sets the approach, PMO keeps score by colleting and assuring the data that others provide it. It should ensure everyone is clear about...
- Who owns what?
- Are we on track?
- If not, so what?
- Who is going to do something about it?
The strategy team helps ask and answer those questions in a consistent way, but the C-suite carries the can.
3. Delivery lives with the teams accountable for it
If the strategy team doesn’t own delivery, who does?
Delivery accountability must live with:
- The C-suite (for major strategic initiatives)
- Their direct reports (for implementation and day-to-day delivery)
That means:
- Delivery leads, project managers and product managers report into operational areas, not into strategy
- Strategy participates in governance, but does not chair delivery on behalf of the business.
- When things go off track, strategy ensures it’s visible.
- Strategy doesn’t “Shore things up” by stepping in as a shadow delivery team.
4. Job Roles, Job Titles and Why They Matter
One of the most persistent—and costly—misunderstandings in organisations is the belief that the project manager is responsible for everything. When job titles are vague, misleading, or misplaced, accountability gets confused, expectations drift, and delivery becomes muddled.
This issue most often surfaces when organisations create hybrid roles such as a “change and delivery lead” within the strategy or change team. On paper, it sounds efficient. In practice, it’s a structural trap.
A job title is not just a label—it’s a contract. It tells the organisation:
- What this person owns
- What they influence
- What they do not own
- Where accountability ultimately sits
Titles that blur these boundaries undermine both strategy and delivery.
5. Why job titles matter
Be very careful around use of traditional job titles that imply ownership such as *delivery lead, project manager, programme lead. It's not that the titles are bad it's that too many people who should know better wrongly assume the role carries end‑to‑end accountability for everything resulting in people avoiding their own responsibilities. In a healthy organisation:
- Project managers coordinate delivery; they don’t own business outcomes.
- Change managers prepare the organisation; they don’t drive delivery timelines.
- Strategy shapes direction; it doesn’t execute it.
Misaligned titles therefore create three major problems:
- False expectations – People assume the PM "has it all covered", so leaders disengage.
- Accountability gaps – When things slip, no one is sure who truly owns the outcome.
- Organisational masking – Skilled PMs pick up dropped balls, hiding structural weaknesses.
Clear, intentional titles protect the organisation from accidental abdication of leadership.
5.1 What to call roles in the strategy and change space
Roles in strategy and change must signal enablement, not ownership.
Appropriate titles can include:
- Change Manager
- Change Lead
- Change Business Partner
Titles to avoid within strategy/change teams:
- Delivery Lead
- Project Manager / Programme Manager
- Anything implying execution ownership
These delivery-aligned titles should exist, but they best sit inside operational areas, where delivery accountability actually lives.
5.2 What these roles actually do (and don’t do)
Change and strategy roles should:
- Help teams get ready for delivery, not deliver for them
- Surface tensions, capability gaps, and constraints
- Design ways of working, governance, and role clarity
- Act as neutral challengers—not the people pushing work over the line
In other words:
They are the stabilisers on the bike—not the person pedalling.
When strategy or change roles start acting as substitute riders, they unintentionally hide:
- Under‑resourced teams
- Unclear ownership
- Weak sponsorship
- Structural misalignment
The work may appear to progress, but the organisation itself does not mature. True transformation requires clarity of roles, clarity of titles, and clarity of accountability.
6. Reporting and benefits: consistency where it matters
One anxiety that often surfaces is:
“Do we need a single, standardised delivery method for everything?”
Answer: No.
Different types of work (infrastructure, digital, culture change, service redesign) may need different delivery approaches.
Where you do need consistency is:
6.1 Reporting against strategic objectives
The strategy team’s role is to ensure that:
- Every strategic initiative is clearly linked to:
- A small number of strategic objectives
- Clear success measures and benefits
- All teams report progress using a common language:
- Are we on track against the agreed strategic outcomes?
- What’s the trajectory?
- What risks or dependencies threaten delivery?
The method can vary. The reporting spine should not.
6.2 Benefits and outcome measurement
Another trap is expecting the strategy function to define and track all the detailed metrics.
Instead:
- Strategic initiative leads own:
- The lower-level, supporting metrics
- The local operational measures
- The benefits they commit to delivering
- The strategy team:
- Ensures those metrics exist and align with the bigger picture
- Checks there is a cadence for reviewing them
- Calls out when benefits are unclear, unrealistic, or unmonitored
Again, accountability stays with operational leaders; strategy provides visibility and challenge.
7. Capability and maturity: targeted support, not blanket training
A natural response to delivery challenges is:
“Should we train everyone in programme and project management?”
Sometimes yes, mostly no.
In practice, a more nuanced approach is needed:
- Invest in formal programme / project training only where:
- An individual is regularly running complex initiatives
- Those skills are core to their role and future
- For everyone else:
- Use the strategy team to run light diagnostics on delivery capability
- Make the current level of maturity visible
- Provide targeted interventions: coaching, templates, facilitation, short bursts of expert support
- Bring in external capability selectively when needed, rather than embedding it everywhere by default
The aim isn’t to turn everyone into a programme manager. It’s to ensure the organisation has enough capability in the right places, supported by a strategy function that knows when and where to intervene.
8. Culture, value streams, and the reality of transformation
Finally, we need to acknowledge the human and cultural side.
Shifting from a traditional project mindset to a strategic, value-stream-based approach is not a rebrand; it’s a transformation.
That means:
- Long-established ways of working will be challenged
- Some leaders will feel their authority or comfort zones are under threat
- Teams may try to pull the strategy function back into old habits: “Can you just run this for us?”
In that context:
- The strategy team holds the line on the vision:
- Why we are changing
- What “good” looks like
- How we’ll make trade-offs and prioritise
- Operational leaders must own the redesign of their functions:
- Aligning structures and roles to strategic objectives
- Agreeing where work sits in value streams
- Taking responsibility for delivery and benefits, not outsourcing it upwards or sideways
The strategy function can enable, challenge, and support – but it cannot substitute for leadership.