Who enables delivery? Building a taxonomy…
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the enabling functions around delivery and am looking to build up a list of common functions and what they do.
When I was at Redgate Software, these enabling functions were known as the Operations teams and they included (from memory): IT, Business Systems, Finance, Technical Support, Facilities and the People (HR) team. I worked very closely with most of these teams and they were all very customer-focussed — both for their internal customers and their external customers (if they had those too). In fact, I’d say they were exemplary service providers, the best I’ve worked with in a 30 year career.
I’ve been consulting a lot in UK central government for the past 5 years. While some of the above functions are replicated there (Finance, HR, Estates (aka Facilities), IT) government also has additional functions and roles that I’ve seen less of in my private sector work (which has mainly been with SMEs):
- Procurement
- Legal
- HR
- Capability
- Communications (Comms) and Engagement
- Strategy
- Portfolio
- Project Management Office
- Internal (and external) assurance
- Spend Control / Service Assessment
- Design Authority
- Information Security
- Other Governance boards
- Records Management / Knowledge & Information Management
- Data (gathering, cleaning, synthesising, publishing)
- Freedom of Information team
- Social Media
- Transformation teams / Change teams / Improvement teams
- Delivery Units
- Secretariat (handling submissions to ministers or Parliament, dealing with major events in the organisation e.g. a ministerial meeting)
- Various professions and communities of practice
Any other examples from government or the private sector that I should include?
Update:
Michael Brunton-Spall adds:
I’d add “executive office”, so private secretary, “office of the …” etc. They’re often part of the executive sponsorship, and should be enabling in that they want to ensure projects are successful and can help facilitate the sponsors getting the right information.
I’d also say that you’ve forgotten press office, which is decidedly different to comms in a lot of places
