It was back in the 80's when US President Ronald Reagan first popularised a three word phrase often attributed in helping turn the tide around a key nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia.

And even though our IT project delivery concerns are arguably less significant than global nuclear disarmament, the same phrase rings just as true today as it did back then:

"TRUST BUT VERIFY"

Many years later as I led a systems team troubleshooting a government web portal these three words became irrevocably etched into my own psyche thanks to a technical resource who took to repeating them as his own personal battle-cry..."Trust but Verify".

But why is this so important in the context of delivery?

You see it's a natural function of our ego to trust. We trust our own judgement, our talent, our hired staff. We trust that the systems and processes being employed are industry best-practice. We trust that managers and delivery teams would never shortcut verification gates for expediency. We trust that the failures to release on time were unavoidable, that the errors found in production were no-ones fault, the last-minute scope changes were required, the rushed deployment cycles acceptable, the surprise cost overruns not uncommon and the half-baked excuses from delivery staff all 'de rigueur' in any modern agile delivery experience! 

Robert Cialdini in his book 'Influence: Science and Practice' gives us some insight as to why this might be the case across many of our organisations. In his book he expands on the concept of 'Behavioral consistency' indicating that people will not only go out of their way to behave consistently, but they will also feel positive about being consistent with their past decisions, even when faced with evidence that their decisions were in error.

Cialdini goes on to state, “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.”

This tendency explains the classic "slow moving train-wreck" scenario we so often have to contend with in the IT delivery space.

That said, with some foresight and leadership it doesn't need to be this way.

Clarity equals power

Professionals like us have years of coal-face experience ensuring timely delivery and service transition of mission critical IT projects across complex business and government systems. We understand the true cost of inaction and we appreciate the challenges faced by executives, program managers and delivery teams in ensuring viable, timely and on-budget outcomes.

However IT delivery is complicated and the nature of our work sometimes requires engaging specialists with the ability to quickly identify service transition inefficiencies and alignment to best-practice principles; not only an invaluable assurance tool, but one we should leverage throughout our delivery life-cycle. 

Although the problems impacting delivery chains may seem simple to rectify, the ongoing challenge for staff is accurately diagnosing them in the first place through the day-to-day noise and our internal behavioral constancy biases.

For this reason it's imperative we establish a periodic review (maturity assessments) cycle across our delivery pipeline to create a clear shared road-