One stack of techniques, applied to the problem in front of us.
The engagements look different from the outside. The methods underneath are largely the same: a small set of analytical traditions, applied with discipline, paired with the qualitative work that turns numbers into decisions.
The delivery health data model: leading indicators, intermediate measures, outcome metrics. The same shape applies to portfolios, networks, and intake systems with different labels at each column.
Seven traditions, woven together.
- 01
System dynamics
The backbone of every diagnostic.
A delivery system is a system of feedback loops. WIP feeds context switching, which feeds rework, which feeds WIP. System dynamics gives me a vocabulary for those loops, and a way to rank the leading indicators that move them.
- Used in
- Delivery Health Obeya
- IT Front Door
- 02
Organisational network analysis
For the questions that org charts cannot answer.
Help, advice, and information flow through an organisation along ties that no reporting line shows. ONA surfaces those ties, names the brokers and bridges, and translates the picture into team-design and knowledge-sharing moves.
- Used in
- Network Analysis
- SkillMap
- DreamWorkplace
- 03
Modern Portfolio Theory
For talking about a roadmap as a set of bets.
A delivery portfolio is a portfolio. Same maths. I use Markowitz-style frontier analysis to expose risk, return, and correlation across the initiatives you fund, and to surface the trade-offs leaders are otherwise making implicitly.
- Used in
- Viable Portfolio
- 04
Obeya
The room where the picture comes together.
Obeya is a Japanese management practice for visual, participatory problem-solving. The room (physical or virtual) brings the data, the narrative, and the people who own the work into a single place. The practice is what makes the analysis stick.
- Used in
- Delivery Health Obeya
- 05
Leading indicators
For seeing problems early enough to act.
Cycle time is a lagging indicator. WIP, refinement effectiveness, scope stability, and approval-wait-time are leading indicators. I rank them by their measured influence on the outcomes you care about, so the conversation moves from "which dashboard?" to "which lever?".
- Used in
- Delivery Health Obeya
- IWRI
- 06
Sensemaking and qualitative contextualisation
Because numbers cannot tell us why on their own.
Quarterly workshops, interviews, and narrative analysis are how the numbers turn into a shared story. Without them, every dashboard becomes a Rorschach test and every meeting an argument about whose story the data supports.
- Used in
- Delivery Health Obeya
- SkillMap
- Network Analysis
- 07
Mission coupling assessment
For deciding when to think alone, and when to think together.
Some teams succeed independently. Some only succeed in a cluster. A mission-coupling assessment puts each unit on a spectrum, and informs whether sensemaking happens team-by-team or as a coupled cohort. It is what stops "everyone in the same room" from becoming the default for problems it does not fit.
- Used in
- Delivery Health Obeya
- Network Analysis
What the techniques are for.
I am not a tool reseller. I am not an out-of-the-box framework salesperson. I do not believe a single methodology survives contact with a real organisation, and I do not believe the techniques on this page are a substitute for the work of paying attention to what is actually happening.
What I do believe is that, in most IT organisations, the data needed to answer the leadership team's hardest questions already exists. It is just scattered, unmodelled, and rarely held against the techniques that can turn it into a decision. My job is to do that work, transparently, and to leave the organisation with the capability to keep doing it after I leave.
"To solve complex problems, we need not only a deep understanding of each cause that impacts the problem, but also how these causes affect and are affected by each other."
From a delivery analytics proposal