Would you ask your partner to also be your marriage guidance counsellor?
No, because that’s not the role you need from them. So why do so many businesses insist their Transformation Director, Programme Lead or Delivery Manager has deep industry experience, when the actual skill they need is delivery?
It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot, and it genuinely shapes how we build teams at ALL3. If a role needs deep subject matter expertise, that makes complete sense. But a lot of transformation and delivery roles aren’t subject matter expert roles at all. They need a different skill entirely, and treating the two as the same thing can cost a business real opportunity.
What these roles are actually there to do
Across transformation, programme and delivery roles, the job is to build a great vision, define how outcomes will be achieved, and bring together the right people from across an organisation to deliver it. It’s translating between IT, the business and the exec. It’s managing time, cost and quality, and showing what’s actually been achieved against what was promised.
None of that requires industry expertise. All of it requires genuine programme and delivery expertise: the ability to build a business case, structure a team, manage risk, and bring people through change. At ALL3, our delivery leads work alongside technical, regulatory and industry specialists, not instead of them. Each plays a different role, and that’s by design.
A delivery leader’s job isn’t to be the industry expert. It’s to bring together the people who are.
The advantage of looking beyond the obvious background
There’s a real upside to building teams with people who haven’t only ever worked in one sector. Fresh perspective, different best practice, ways of thinking that haven’t been shaped by “how things have always been done” in that particular industry.
Some of the most interesting challengers in any sector got there precisely because their teams weren’t built from the traditional talent pool. They borrowed great ideas from elsewhere and adapted them, rather than inheriting the assumptions of the incumbents they were competing with.
That’s exactly the thinking behind how we build teams at ALL3. Most of us came from the client side, across a genuinely wide range of sectors. When we put a team together for a client, whether that’s leading a transformation programme, managing change and adoption, or designing a new operating model, we’re not limited to people who’ve only ever worked in their specific industry. We choose on delivery capability first, and pair that with the right specialist input where it’s genuinely needed.
What this means for the businesses we work with
It means you get a team chosen for proven delivery, not just a CV that happens to mention your sector. People who’ve built business cases that stood up, structured teams that worked, and brought people through change successfully, across multiple industries and multiple types of transformation.
And where deep technical or regulatory expertise genuinely matters, we bring that in alongside the delivery lead, properly resourced, rather than expecting one person to carry both jobs at once.
Final thought
I can’t think of anything worse than expecting my partner to also be a marriage guidance counsellor. That’s not the role I need from them. The same logic applies to how we build transformation, programme and delivery teams at ALL3: the right delivery capability, paired with the right specialist expertise, chosen deliberately rather than defaulted to.
If you’d like to talk through how ALL3 builds teams around delivery capability, and brings in specialist expertise exactly where it’s needed, Get in touch or explore how we work.