Seven Consulting's Delivery Playbook

In this episode of Seven Consulting's Delivery Playbook, Rob Thomsett explores one of the most overlooked causes of project failure: dependencies.  Projects rarely operate in isolation. Data, process, policy, finance, client impacts, and shared resources all create complex connections that can significantly influence delivery outcomes. Rob discusses the six key dependency types every project leader should understand, why people dependencies are often the most challenging, and how executive sponsors play a critical role in resolving resource conflicts and competing priorities.

Through practical examples and real-world insights, this episode highlights why successful project delivery requires a broader ecosystem perspective rather than a narrow project-by-project view.  If you're involved in project delivery, PMO leadership, change management, or portfolio governance, this episode offers valuable insights into managing the interconnected reality of modern organisations.  Listen now and discover why every project decision creates ripple effects across the wider ecosystem.

What do Australia's rabbit plague, feral cats and project management have in common?    In this episode of Seven Consulting’s Delivery Playbook, Rob Thomsett explores why projects should be viewed as ecosystems rather than isolated initiatives. Drawing lessons from one of Australia's most famous environmental disasters, Rob explains how stakeholders, influence and organisational dynamics shape project success.  Learn how to identify critical stakeholders, build trust, uncover hidden concerns and navigate the complex organisational environment that surrounds every project. Part 1 of a two-part series on the Project Ecosystem.

ERP programs are high stakes and too many still fail to deliver real business outcomes.  In this episode, Seven Consulting’s Delivery Playbook unpacks the most common mistakes we see in modern ERP implementations, from weak foundations and poor scoping to over engineered solutions and missed user adoption.

We share practical mitigation strategies drawn from real delivery experience, helping you avoid costly rework and ensure your transformation is driven by business outcomes, not technology constraints.

We also explore how today’s leading platforms compare, and how emerging capabilities like AI and conversational interfaces are reshaping the future of enterprise systems.

What if your project is “successful” on paper, but fails the business, the users, or the team?  In this episode of Seven Consulting’s Delivery Playbook, Seven’s Thought Leader, Rob Thomsett introduces one of Seven Consulting’s most powerful internal frameworks: Project Success Sliders.

For decades, project success has been defined by the iron triangle of time, cost, and scope. In this conversation, Rob explains why that narrow definition is no longer enough — and how it ignores outcomes, benefits realisation, quality, stakeholder engagement, and the human cost of delivery.

 The Success Sliders reframe project success as a negotiated, multi‑dimensional agreement between sponsor and delivery team. Using seven clearly defined dimensions — including time, budget, scope, value, quality, stakeholder engagement, and team satisfaction — Rob demonstrates how sliders expose trade‑offs, predict risk, and prevent hidden compromises before they derail a project.

 Through practical examples, including high‑pressure “death march” projects and real‑world trade‑off scenarios, this episode shows how the sliders can be used as both a risk‑forecasting tool and a dynamic health check throughout delivery.

If you’re responsible for projects, programs, or PMOs, this episode will change how you define — and negotiate — success.

Change inevitably happens from projects in your organisation, but does it happen the same way twice? The signs of variability may be familiar: Change is managed well on one project and left to chance on the next. Different Change practitioners take their own approach with no shared standard to fall back on. And even when the effort is there, it's hard to know if the change actually landed because little was tracked to prove it.

 Where would you start?  In the latest episode of Delivery Playbook, we unpack The Levers to Pull and Mistakes to Avoid When Building an Enterprise Change Function. This material is drawn from our GM Change Management, Temre Green's session at our 2024 Delivery Summit.

 The episode walks through the different types of Change structures with real trade-offs depending on what your organisation wants to achieve. From there, we cover the four levers that shape how the function actually operates day to day. We then close out with seven common mistakes organisations make when building a Change function along with mitigation strategies for each.

Projects don’t deliver value—outcomes do. In this episode, Seven Consulting Thought Leader, Rob Thomsett explores how benefits planning and realisation should sit at the heart of delivery. From measurable benefits to realisation risk, we unpack how to move beyond outputs and deliver true business value.  

At Seven Consulting, we believe successful delivery starts with choosing the right approach—not defaulting to agile or traditional. In this episode of the Delivery Playbook, Founder Declan Boylan explores one of the most critical risks in program delivery: getting the setup right from day one.

Drawing on experience delivering $4–5bn in programs annually, we unpack why even experienced program managers can design fundamentally different approaches to the same problem—and how that variability introduces risk.

We introduce Pathfinder, Seven Consulting’s proprietary framework for selecting and shaping delivery approaches. By assessing both program characteristics and organisational readiness, it enables teams to move beyond opinion and gut feel—towards structured, evidence-based decision-making in under 30 minutes.

The conversation also explores:

• Why the “agile vs traditional” debate misses the point
• How organisations evolve towards blended delivery models
• The role of organisational readiness in determining what’s actually feasible
• Why governance must shift beyond time and cost to focus on benefit (scope) and quality

This episode reflects Seven Consulting’s approach to delivery: structured, practical, and grounded in real-world execution.

What does real project success actually look like and why do so many initiatives deliver “the thing” but fail to deliver value? In this episode of Seven Consulting’s Delivery Playbook, Seven’s Thought Leader, Rob Thomsett explores two core frameworks behind high-value program delivery: the Whole of Life perspective and the O3 Model (Objectives, Outputs, Outcomes).

 Together, they challenge the traditional view that projects end at go-live and explain why successful delivery depends on planning for support and benefits realisation from day one. Rob breaks down the critical difference between outputs and outcomes and why focusing on the “why” fundamentally changes how projects should be designed, governed, and measured.

 Using real‑world examples, including London’s Thames Tideway “Super Sewer”, this conversation shows how clarity of purpose, strong sponsorship, and outcome‑driven thinking can dramatically improve delivery results.

 If you’re responsible for projects, programs, PMOs, or change initiatives, this episode provides practical, immediately applicable insights into delivering outcomes — not just outputs.