Is Your Delivery Team’s Success The Demise of Your Company?

At the current rate of demand, infrastructure companies are moving so fast that delivery has become the primary, and sometimes the only, priority.

Build faster. Deploy faster. Get more capacity online. Repeat.

It makes sense to a certain extent. The demand is enormous, and the quickest one to the table will get the largest piece.

The irony is that the infrastructure that these teams are building is about to fundamentally change how their businesses operate.

AI is not just creating more demand for physical infrastructure. It is going to change how work gets done across every organization. And many infrastructure companies are not preparing for that shift, because they are too busy building the pipeline for it.

The Delivery Paradox

As companies race to build more data centers, power infrastructure, and other physical assets, the delivery organization naturally becomes the center of gravity.

The best people get pulled into the projects that need them most, while program management gets deprioritized.

Operating processes remain informal, and million-dollar mistakes are brushed off as part of the “growing pains.” So no one takes the time to build-out a system that eliminates risk and enables scalable growth.

So every single project requires extremely experienced and savvy PMs, because oganizational decisions that should be made at the enterprise level get solved repeatedly at the project level.

This works, until it doesn’t.

And most companies are starting to see the breaking point. Finding the right talent.

The problem with the current system is it’s dependence on a very niche, and highly technical individual that can navigate these spaces and drive progress.

The infrastructure boom is creating an insurmountable need for these highly skilled managers. The ones your company has already hired are getting burnt out. And you still have an increasing backlog with no one yet assigned.

So companies need to deliver an exponentially larger portfolio without increasing their dependence on highly skilled individuals

The first thing that might pop into your mind is to use AI to support the delivery teams. And AI does have the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of work that requires highly specialized human judgment.

However, there’s a prerequisite to use AI: You need an operating system for AI to run on.

You can’t just throw AI tools at employees and then add 10 projects to their bandwidth.

It requires a more strategic approach at the portfolio level. But AI can’t reliably automate an organization that doesn’t know how it operates.

If critical decisions live in someone’s head, AI can’t access them. If processes change from project to project, AI can’t reliably execute them. If data is fragmented across spreadsheets, emails, meetings, and disconnected systems, AI can’t turn it into organizational intelligence.

And if every project is reinventing the same process, you’re not scaling a company. You’re scaling complexity.

So the first goal post is reducing complexity.

In order to keep up with the pace of work, you need to be able to widen your hiring search to all capable managers. The only thing in the way of that, is the unnecessary complexity involved in managing your projects.

Unnecessary?

Think about your best project managers. They clearly have a way of executing projects that seems to work. Reducing risk, encouraging collaboration, and they probably have a checklist of items for what gets done at each stage in the project.

Why doesn’t the company use this to standardize operations across all projects? Take the information that already exists today and build it into the backend systems for operations across the portfolio.

Not only will this improve consistency across projects, but it will drastically reduce the level of expertise that you will need to hire for.

Continue to focus on project execution. But pull 1-2 highly skilled PMs to create the gold standard for how you want your projects to run.

Try not to see this as risking the success of 2 projects, view it as a critical investment that solidifes the success of the next 100 projects.

The time you take now to build out the structure into your operations arm now, will result in billions of new revenue and millions saved in reducing risk.

It requires standardized processes. It requires centralized visibility across the portfolio. It requires institutional knowledge to become organizational knowledge.

The Silent Compounder

Without even thinking about it, what you have done is create a company structure that can now seamlessly integrate AI.

You get the immediate benefits of reduced risk across your portfolio, streamlined delivery, and improved employee retention.

But the real progress here is in knowing that you now how a framework in which you can start using AI in meaningful way that will enable you to scale with AI.

You will be ready to embrace the monumental shift that AI is going to create in workplaces around the world, and in every business. The same exact shift that you are building data centers and infrastructure to enable.

Your delivery team is critical. But the systems you build to support them, is more important today than it has ever been.

It will define your success in the next year, and define if you will be able to maintain that success over the next 10 years.