As a consultant you can’t simply arrive, grab a cup of tea and start making a team deliver work better.

And it’s not just about understanding the context either.

There are too many moving parts for that, and the people leading delivery are usually the ones with the least capacity to absorb change — and the most connections to everything else that needs to move.

Thanks to my experience I’m relatively quick to understand the challenges of a delivery team in agency delivery. I’ve done it many times, I have a solid set of questions and measures that I run through. I’ve learned that each situation is unique, but the patterns repeat more than people expect.

I can create a solid status report with input from all the key people within a week or two. When I read it back to stakeholders everybody nods and agrees and gets excited for the opportunities. In their eagerness to get started, they ask what comes next.

And then, almost immediately everything slows, because change is hard, and an agency prioritising that change over billability is harder.

The understanding and the planning are easier to work through. The action is always where things stall. Meaningful improvement in a delivery team requires the following elements.

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There are more agency awards than ever.

More categories. More ceremonies. More tables to buy. More reasons to attend.

And somewhere along the way, it becomes reasonable to ask:

What are we awarding anyway?

Because when you look closely, the volume starts to dilute the meaning. Not always, but often enough that agency leaders are weighing the effort, cost, and value with more scrutiny than before.

This is not really about whether awards are good or bad. It is about whether they still make sense. And when they actually serve the agency, rather than the other way around.

The growing weight of awards

For established agencies, awards tend to appear at a particular stage.

You have strong clients. The work is good. The team is proud of what they are producing.

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Not the obvious ones. The quieter spaces where something is missing, but the system still appears to function. Where people are busy, well intentioned, and doing their best, while quietly compensating for something nobody has named.

One of those gaps became very clear in a process I was asked to spend some time with recently.

The business had done what it believed was the responsible thing. Time and care had gone into producing a detailed specification internally. Requirements were thought through. Edge cases captured. Decisions signed off. On paper, it looked solid.

And yet, the same questions kept resurfacing. Clarifications. Reinterpretations. Small misunderstandings that did not feel serious enough to escalate, but persistent enough to slow things down. Nothing dramatic. Just enough friction to make the work heavier than it needed to be.

It would have been easy to pin that on execution. Or communication. Or individuals not reading closely enough. That is usually where these conversations drift.

But sitting with it for a while, something else felt off.

The specification was doing its job inside the business. It created confidence. It reduced perceived risk. It allowed decisions to move forward. Once it crossed the boundary to the delivery team, though, it became something different. A document to interpret. To infer from. To work around.

No one had failed. The gap sat between contexts.

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