5 minutes with… Jonny Williams
Jonny Williams is Chief Digital Adviser - UK Public Sector at Red Hat. Prior to this he was Head of Delivery at Homes England. He also provides coaching at DeliverValue.uk. Having enabled teams to deliver value for over ten years, he now supports organisations to uncover effective modern approaches to work.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in May 2023 and Jonny has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I pursued a career in Delivery Management after being exposed to agile ways of working related to content design and strategy. Having been involved in significant organisational change focussed around systems thinking and process improvement, discovering agile was like someone joining up the dots. I realised that other people had also faced similar challenges to those I encountered when delivering projects and programmes, and that there was a large community of people determined to make things better. The solutions I had “invented” aligned with existing practices that I began to discover. My immersion into the world of agility was formalised when I became an Agile Delivery Manager at DWP.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
Listen and learn. It’s daunting to be new in a space that has so much expertise mixed with a lot of complexity, and sometimes this can lead us to seek validation as a form of assurance. However, I think a lot of people who are just getting started end up falling into the trap of trying to apply theory without context.
Most of the time the best way to serve a team is to observe and discover what they truly need rather than jumping in with a framework or a tool. Taking your time to become a trusted advisor is essential to true success.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
Absolutely, but then who hasn’t? I remember interviewing someone who didn’t seem to have a single bad experience with delivery and it made me wonder if they ever actually delivered anything. From gantt charts created by senior stakeholders to requirements being requested with zero budget, I’ve been involved in some challenging situations. I would say the most difficult work that I’ve done involved wholesale large scale transformation at an organisation that had failed to change anything substantial over the course of a few years. Some simple advice for anyone reading; change gradually. Sadly that org didn’t want to heed the same advice.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
I talk about the three aspects of enablement in my book Delivery Management; coaching, facilitation, and impediment removal. However, you can boil all three of those down further into one skill which is social awareness. If you can understand what people need, and consider what is influencing them, you can usually offer some type of help.
Most of the complexity in the work we do involves people, so focus on skills that enable you to have constructive interactions and take actions that have a positive impact on the people around you.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
The biggest challenge I think Delivery Managers face is the ongoing misunderstandings around what they do. I am very passionate about the idea of Delivery Managers being team enablers, supporting others to achieve valuable outcomes, without adopting a command and control approach. I think this is the way to get the best from knowledge workers and help them feel empowered. For Project Managers I think that the constant need to evolve creates a lot of pressure, and the ongoing shifts we will see in the workforce as younger generations with greater desires to be autonomous will drive further changes to project approaches.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
The moon landing. I can only imagine the scale of the challenge that those teams faced while being part of something so monumental with truly inspirational leadership from JFK. What a vision to work towards. I also think the coordination efforts of D-Day would have been something to behold. Finally, the formation of GDS and the delivery of GOV.UK, which I would argue is one of the greatest things achieved in the UK over the last twenty years.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.