Delivery vs Control: Ensuring Your Team Creates Value, Not Just Reports It

Delivery vs Control: Who’s Actually Doing the Work?

I once worked with a client who had a delivery problem – as many companies do.

Work wasn’t moving. Value wasn’t reaching the customer. Leaders couldn’t understand why.

To clarify, I suggested a simple audit. Focus on roles, not people. Identify which roles were actually delivering value. And value is always created external to the business.

I asked the managers to classify roles into four categories:

1. Building the product or service – the work that directly creates customer value.
2. Supporting the product or service – customer care, pre-sales, or operational support.
3. Organising people or work – managers, coordinators, and planners.
4. Admin – reporting, finance, and other back-office tasks.

In small companies, you typically find most people in categories 1 and 2. In large organisations, the numbers often flip.

The Cost of Control

Large organisations tend to hire to control work. Managers hire people to manage people. Layers grow. Admin grows. Delivery can shrink. In fact, in many large organisations there are a lot of people doing nothing but reporting on what other people are doing...

In this client’s team, the breakdown was revealing:

• 20% delivering the product
• 10% supporting it
• 60% organising people and work
• 10% in admin

This imbalance is common in big companies. More salary was spent on organising work than actually delivering value.

Why It Matters

This audit shows three things:

• Where your money is going. Salaries are the largest cost for most companies.
• What leaders value. They tend to value control – but often, this control, is nothing but an illusion. 👉 See this post on Watermelon Reporting.
• Organisational complexity. Bloated teams make it harder to deliver value. Red tape, meetings, governance boards, multiple decision makers...all areas ripe for Releasing Business Agility.

The Solution

Instead of adding more people to control work, focus on clarity, alignment, and action.

Empower the people doing the work:

• Create a compelling, interesting and exciting future to aim at
• Identify the problems stopping people from doing good work – and work hard to solve them
• Deal with low performance, so you can build a team to get it done.
• Delegate responsibility
• Train and support them
• Encourage and coach them on making decisions.
• Teach effective communication and problem-solving

Oversight is necessary, but it should not dominate or burden the team. Ensure that more people are delivering value than organising it.

A Simple Check

Even a basic breakdown of roles gives leaders insight into structure and priorities. It highlights where to focus improvements.

The principle is simple: invest in people who create value, not just those who manage it. Do this consistently, and delivery improves, costs are controlled, and the organisation becomes more effective.