5 minutes with… Rich Cassidy
Rich is Head of Strategic Delivery & Operations at Camden Council. Before that he was Head of Delivery Management at FutureGov and Delivery Lead at GDS. For 10 years, he’s been helping people to overcome complex challenges whilst having fun doing so.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in June 2023 and Rich has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
It sounds very cliché, but I really do believe in the power of teamwork. Helping people achieve much more together than they could ever accomplish apart fills me with a real sense of satisfaction. I chose to work in the public sector in particular because I see too many people struggling through incredible hardship who shouldn’t have to; I feel one way I can help is by supporting people with diverse skills, experiences, and perspectives to work together to solve problems in ways we haven’t tried before. I also want to make sure that groups working on difficult problems are able to care about themselves and each other, as well as the people they’re trying to help - a project's success should never come at the expense of a team's happiness or wellbeing.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
Embrace the fact that your greatest strengths as a Delivery Manager are what many people still refer to as ‘soft skills’. For a long time there's been a rhetoric around ‘soft skills’ that they’re in some way nice-to-have or secondary to much ‘harder’ technical expertise when, in reality, not everybody is great at those things. When I stopped worrying that I didn’t have a more conventional specialism, I felt much more confident in my place within teams and was able to be much better at my job.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
Yes, quite a few, but I don’t mean ‘difficult’ in terms of the complexity of the problem the project is trying to solve - I mean ‘difficult’ in the sense that it feels incredibly hard and thankless to help move things forward. It usually boils down to the various people or groups involved in a project not being honest about what they really want or need from it. This then leads to lots of time and emotional energy spent second-guessing and dancing around input and feedback grounded in emotion, assumptions, and personality, rather than anything more concrete that lends itself to a shared purpose. When this happens, it’s the role of a Delivery Manager to create ways in which people feel able to express their preferences and vested interests and brokering a clear, shared purpose at a pace they feel they can get on board with.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
This answer is undoubtedly biased by the style and approach I favour, but I think the fundamental value of delivery management comes from the ability to investigate, understand and to break problems and challenges down into a logical sequence of tasks that can be worked on. This is much easier and likely to be much more comprehensive if you’re empathetic, able to apply different perspectives to situations, and comfortable supporting people through conversations in which they might feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
There’s definitely a challenge in explaining the value of delivery management - especially as something distinct from project management or general team management.
Many teams and organisations are understandably reassured by the idea of a bringing in a tried-and-tested framework - like Scrum, Safe, PRINCE2, those sort of things - but I’m yet to be convinced that this is what really sets up teams and organisations to confidently achieve their goals sustainably or repeatedly.
Again, all of those ‘soft skills’ I referred to earlier can feel like a bit of a slow burn when somebody is looking for a quick fix - but in my experience these quick fixes often unravel fairly quickly without the stronger foundations that delivery management brings, especially if you’re looking to achieve a sustained shift in organisational culture and mindset rather than embed a particular methodology.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
Because most of the things I’ve worked on have involved the introduction of a process of continuous improvement, it can feel like what was created at the end of a project no longer exists because it’s changed so much. So very selfishly it would be nice to have worked on something physical and a bit more permanent I can point at long after the project has finished. I feel like it would be immensely satisfying to work on something very tangible and logistically complicated - I remember being strangely fascinated by the Games Lanes that helped manage the flow of traffic during the 2012 Olympics and I often wonder if there’s a bit of an overlap between Delivery Management and some of the really logistical aspect of TV production.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.