Strategy Intent to Delivery Reality – Making Strategy Happen

David Dunning (BIG CIC) with Adam Palmer (Head of Transformation, Welsh Water)

In a recent conversation, Adam described the approach he has developed and now applies in his role as Head of Transformation.

It will feel familiar to many. He is focused on bringing discipline to the point where strategy meets reality:

• understanding the organisation’s strategic direction
• ensuring initiatives genuinely align to it
• prioritising what gets done, and in what order
• being clear on what metrics are being impacted, and to what extent

As he put it: “Focusing on nailing the what, why and when before looking at the how.”

Alongside this, he is pushing teams to be explicit about a simple but often missing thread:

capability → outcome → benefit

• What are we delivering?
• What outcome does that enable?
• When does that outcome become a realised, measurable benefit?

This is not theory. This is the work of making strategy real.

What makes this particularly recognisable is where this work often starts in practice.

It rarely begins with a clean, structured set of initiatives aligned to strategy. More often, it starts with a long list – sometimes hundreds of items – each with a cost, varying levels of clarity, and an expectation to prioritise.

In that situation, there is usually immediate pressure to move into budget and resource allocation – to start planning the “how” before the “what” and “why” have been properly understood.

Adam’s consistent approach is to deliberately slow this moment down – not to halt progress, but to introduce structure before commitment.

He introduces a phased approach, creating space to:

• segment and understand the work
• test its alignment to strategic intent
• and establish a clearer basis for prioritisation

That shift alone changes the conversation.

Why this resonates

We speak to many delivery and transformation professionals who find themselves in a very similar position.

They are not struggling with delivery mechanics. They are trying to make sense of:

• initiatives that are labelled “strategic” but loosely defined
• unclear or inconsistent links back to strategy
• too many competing demands for limited capacity
• difficulty explaining why one thing should take priority over another

So they start in the same place:

• bring clarity to what is actually being done
• make the logic visible
• force better conversations about priority and value

As this work develops, it often becomes possible to group and sequence initiatives into something more coherent – a narrative of how the organisation moves from its current position towards its intended future, with clear checkpoints along the way.

In practice, this isn’t just about ranking similar initiatives.

As part of this, Adam segments the work into three layers:

• Layer 1 – what must be done (e.g. cyber, maintenance, upgrades)
• Layer 2 – what is intended to release benefit
• Layer 3 – what can be shaped, sequenced, or deferred

That layering becomes part of the prioritisation itself.

It’s practical. It’s necessary. And in many organisations, it’s the only place where this work can begin.

What happens when you push this further?

What makes this particularly interesting is what starts to surface once you apply this thinking consistently.

A few questions naturally begin to emerge:

• How clear and usable is the “strategic direction” you are aligning to?
• Are different parts of the organisation interpreting that direction in the same way?
• When you prioritise initiatives, what are you prioritising against?

And more fundamentally:

• how do these decisions play out when operational demands, regulatory expectations, asset investment, and longer-term change all compete for the same resources?

These are not criticisms of the approach.

They are the natural next questions that arise when you start to make work and decisions more explicit.

Why we think this is worth exploring

This approach reflects a pattern we see repeatedly.

Change often starts at the point of pressure – where delivery teams are trying to make sense of competing demands.

That’s where:

• assumptions get challenged
• gaps become visible
• and the limits of existing approaches show up

This is not working around the system. It is testing it. Rather than trying to resolve all of that upfront, there is value in exploring it in the open, over time.

So this is the starting point. In the next pieces, we’ll follow this line of thinking further:

• what happens as large, unstructured demand sets are shaped into something that can genuinely be prioritised
• how the balance between “non-negotiable” and “value” work plays out in practice
• what becomes visible about strategy when delivery teams start to interrogate it
• and what happens when you try to prioritise across different types of work, not just initiatives

Most importantly, we’ll come back to Adam’s experience:

• What changed as a result of taking this approach?
• What got easier? What got harder?
• What happens as this thinking starts to connect more closely with upstream strategy conversations?

If you’re working in a similar space, it would be useful to hear:

• are you starting in the same place?
• are you encouraged to focus downstream, but not invited upstream?
• what are you finding when you push this thinking into your organisation?

Addendum – A practical path for P3 professionals

For those working in portfolio, programme and project roles, Adam’s starting point will feel very familiar.

You are often asked to:

• align delivery to strategy
• prioritise initiatives
• make sense of competing demands

…without always being given a clear or consistent strategic framework to work from.

One of the things we have been exploring through BIG is a pragmatic way to build from that position. Not by stepping outside your remit – but by deepening it.

A typical progression looks like this:

1. Start with prioritisation

Introduce a structured, transparent way to compare initiatives.

Even if strategy is not well defined, you can:

• establish a consistent scoring model
• make assumptions explicit
• reduce purely political decision-making

This creates a first layer of discipline and credibility.

2. Connect prioritisation back to strategy

Once you have a scoring model, the next question naturally follows:

• what are we actually scoring against?

This opens up a conversation about:

• strategic drivers
• themes or outcomes
• and how clearly these are defined and owned

At this stage, many organisations are still working with proxies for strategy rather than explicit objectives – and that’s OK as a starting point.

3. Make dependencies and trade-offs visible

As prioritisation matures, it becomes clear that initiatives are not independent.

You start to see:

• sequencing constraints
• interdependencies between initiatives
• and cases where removing one item undermines others

At the same time, the question of trade-offs becomes more real:

• what gives when capacity is constrained?
• is capacity actually constrained – or – do we need to make choices between options outside of just investments (BAU, product creation etc)
• how do different types of work interact?

This moves prioritisation from ranking lists to shaping a coherent plan of all workloads, not just investments.

4. Move towards objective-level thinking

Over time, a further question emerges:

• who actually owns the outcomes we are trying to achieve?

This is where the shift happens:

• from scoring initiatives against broad drivers
• to managing delivery against clearly defined objectives

At this point, the conversation moves beyond “which projects do we do?” to:

• “are we going to achieve our objectives?”
• “what is helping or hindering that?”

And with that, P3 roles begin to extend from supporting delivery to supporting decision-making at a more strategic level.

This is not a prescribed method.

It is a path many practitioners find themselves following – often implicitly.

What Adam is doing reflects the early stages of that journey:

• bringing structure to demand
• introducing disciplined prioritisation
• and making the logic of decisions more explicit

In future pieces, we will explore how that journey develops – and what becomes possible as these practices mature.

What next?

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