Organized to Deliver: How Can Companies Consistently Finish What They Start?

Most organizations are good at launching new ideas, yet few are as good at finishing them. How can leaders create the conditions that drive great initiatives all the way to the finish line?

​​​Executives sign off on bold strategies in boardrooms around the world, like new digital platforms, global expansion, and sustainability targets. Yet all too often something goes wrong: timelines slip, results disappoint, and leadership momentum fades. It’s not the ambition that fails​​; it’s the organization’s ability to deliver fully. 

A recent McKinsey interview reveals a stark reality: about 70% of large-scale transformations fail to meet their intended outcomes. ​​Strategy is as much of the problem for many organizations as a lack of structure. Completing major undertakings isn’t always a project-management issue​​; it’s often an organizational-design challenge. 

Shireen Ng, Director at Signium in Singapore, comments:

“Leaders are dealing with real pressures right now​​, such as digital disruption, tight talent markets, and constant economic changes. ​​What matters most in times like these is turning intention into action. Organizations that learn to deliver, not just dream, are the ones getting ahead.” 

Why do organizations struggle to complete what they start? 

Many leaders assume that execution that stalls reflects a lack of effort or discipline. In reality, most breakdowns stem from the way the organization is shaped: how priorities are set, how decisions flow, and how work moves from one team to another. 

Priority overload drains momentum 

Executives often underestimate how much capacity, focus, and skill it takes to deliver work well. When organizations take on too many priorities at once, they stretch their teams thin and reduce their ability to follow through on any of them effectively. 

Recent research from Bain & Company shows that a vast majority of large-scale transformations – roughly 88% – fall short of their original goals, often because companies overload their top talent and stretch capacity too thin. Similarly, McKinsey’s 2023 State of Organizations report finds that structural and organizational constraints remain the key barrier to successful transformation, not flawed strategy. 

“When too many efforts run in parallel, each competes for limited talent, attention, and funding,” says Ng. “Rather than a portfolio of well-executed moves, companies end up with a long list of half-finished initiatives. This is a clear sign that structural capacity does not match strategic intent.” 

Excess handoffs and structural friction 

Work is organized by department in most companies. A project has to pass from one team to the next – from IT to marketing, then to operations, then to finance. Every handoff has the potential to create delays and confusion about who actually owns the outcome. 

With each additional layer of coordination​​, the risk rises that no one feels full ownership. Teams lose momentum, and decision cycles extend. ​​The result is that even well-designed initiatives falter. This is not because their purpose is wrong, but because organizational mechanics weigh them down. 

Lack of “sunset clauses” 

Organizations are often reluctant to kill underperforming initiatives. Without clearly defined exit criteria or “sunset clauses,” resources remain tied up in what is termed “zombie projects” long past their usefulness. ​​These drain capacity over time, energy, and focus, leaving more promising strategic bets starved for resources. 

“It takes a good measure of courage and discipline to recognize and stop what doesn’t work,” says Ng. “When you’re able to pull the plug on underperforming strategies, you can reallocate capacity swiftly and decisively to those that are working. This is one of the simplest yet most powerful ways to prevent stagnation.” 

Misaligned incentives 

​​​Leadership often rewards lower-impact activity like start-ups, pilots, and innovation theatre. The spotlight shines on who launched the most initiatives, but not on who delivered real impact. That sends a powerful message to key players: visibility matters more than outcome. 

Meanwhile​​, delivery roles often remain undervalued. Talent that actually brings change to life, such as project managers, program leads, and transformation architects, receives little career recognition. When those responsible for execution feel invisible, motivation and accountability erode. 

The human cost: exhaustion, turnover, and stalled change 

The symptoms are familiar. Backlogs grow, launch rates decline, and talented people burn out. ​​Transformation timelines begin to slip, and even the most committed teams become skeptical or cynical, which further undermines momentum. 

“When people feel stretched too thin, without the satisfaction of seeing results, they stop believing the organization can deliver on what it promises,” says Ng. “You see it in morale, in turnover, and in the quiet frustration that builds when teams are asked to do more than the system can support.” 

When this happens, delivery slows not because of poor talent or lack of effort, but because people simply no longer have the capacity, or the belief, to sustain the pace. 

Governance and portfolio rules that power project completion 

If flawed structure is the problem, a disciplined governance and portfolio management approach becomes the core solution. 

Disciplined portfolio governance 

Organizations gain far more traction when they manage their major initiatives as a connected portfolio, and not scattered ad-hoc projects. To bring discipline to that portfolio, leaders should set up stage gates to assess progress. These rigorous evaluations are conducted at key milestones, measuring feasibility, resource allocation, risk, and value, before each initiative is allowed to advance further. 

It’s just as important to prioritize work based on the resources you actually have. Instead of green-lighting every good idea, leaders commit only to what the organization can realistically support. That discipline reduces overload and ensures focus. 

Initiatives must also include sunset clauses where required. If performance thresholds aren’t met by a certain stage gate, the initiative is re-assessed, paused, or even terminated. This ensures resources flow where value is real, not where good intentions linger. 

“Monitoring initiatives can call for brutal decision-making,” comments Ng. “Sometimes leaders have to let go of ideas they really believed in. Milestone reviews make those decisions easier by showing whether real value is being created. It’s natural to want to follow your heart, but portfolio governance helps leaders recognize when it’s time to follow the numbers.” 

Leadership habits that sustain delivery 

Having a governance model is only the beginning – it only works when it’s consistently put into practice. Regular check-ins give everyone a clear view of what’s progressing, what’s stuck, and where capacity is being stretched. 

Decision-making has to be clear for these reviews to work. Leaders need to agree on what moves forward, what pauses, and what should stop. When this rhythm becomes part of how leaders work, it creates the steady momentum long-term initiatives need to stay on track. 

“Where governance gives you the framework, it’s the leadership habits that keep everything moving,” says Ng. “You can have the best model on paper​​, but progress only happens when leaders engage regularly and make decisions that keep delivery on track.” 

Redefining the role of the executive sponsor 

​​​In many organizations, executive sponsors are present at the start of an initiative but play a limited role after the launch. Teams often need far more than symbolic support. They need a senior leader who actively helps the work move forward. 

Effective sponsors step in where their authority is most useful: clearing roadblocks, protecting the team’s capacity, and coordinating decisions spanning multiple departments. They make sure the right people are in the room, that progress isn’t held up by avoidable delays, and that the team has what it needs to succeed. 

In this sense, sponsorship is less about lending a name to an initiative and more about giving it the backing, support, and decision-making muscle it needs to deliver results. 

Three ways to design operating models for delivery beyond intent 

Designing for delivery often requires rethinking how work is structured day to day.  

1. Delivery squads with end-to-end ownership  

Organizations that deliver consistently often structure work around small, cross-functional squads with clear, end-to-end ownership. These teams bring together the skills required to design, build, test, launch, and refine a product or capability without having to hand off work across multiple departments. 

By giving a single team full accountability across the lifecycle, organizations reduce the handoffs that typically slow progress and dilute responsibility.  

• Decisions move faster. 

• Coordination becomes simpler. 

• Teams can respond more quickly to changing needs or new information. 

A defining feature of effective delivery squads is true autonomy paired with clear outcomes: teams make day-to-day decisions, manage their workload, and adapt as they learn, all while staying accountable for measurable results. 

This model reduces friction, strengthens ownership, and speeds up cycles because the team closest to the work has the authority to move it forward. 

2. Designing around value streams rather than functions 

While delivery squads define who does the work, value streams define how the work flows. A value-stream approach organizes work around the sequence of steps that create value for the customer, rather than around functional departments like engineering, marketing, or operations. 

By keeping work within one flow, from concept to delivery, organizations reduce delays, avoid fragmentation, and make it easier to identify what’s slowing progress. Teams stay connected throughout the product or service’s full journey, which supports faster delivery and clearer accountability. 

Organizing around value streams ensures the workflow itself supports the team’s ability to deliver, rather than forcing the work to navigate complex functional boundaries. 

3. Measuring outcomes, not just activity 

To sustain a delivery-first culture, traditional “activity KPIs” (number of projects started, number of meetings, number of status reports) must give way to outcome KPIs. These metrics include time-to-value, customer adoption, productivity gains, quality, and value delivered. 

When teams are judged on outcomes rather than just outputs, accountability deepens, and execution becomes strategic rather than administrative. 

Prioritization tips and tools that prevent decision paralysis 

Even the best strategy fails without disciplined prioritization. What distinguishes high-performing executive teams is not their ambition, but their ability to choose less and back those choices consistently. 

Simple tools that keep decisions moving 

Executives do not need complex frameworks. They need clarity. Organizations that deliver consistently use lightweight, easy-to-replicate tools: 

• Impact-effort matrices help leaders quickly distinguish between high-value bets and distractions. 

• Cost-of-delay scoring, widely used in enterprise-scale agile systems, estimates the financial and strategic cost of slowing or deferring an initiative. 

• Capacity-driven gating, ensuring decisions align with real organizational bandwidth rather than theoretical optimism. 

These tools reduce analysis paralysis and accelerate momentum by encouraging leaders to rely on evidence rather than instinct. 

Clear decision rights 

Many stalled initiatives suffer from circular decision-making: too many voices, unclear authority, and no decisive owner. Bain’s RAPID Decision Making framework is one of several proven models for clarifying roles. This tool is designed to define who recommends, who approves, who performs, who inputs, and who is informed.  

Without explicit decision rights, even simple choices slow to a crawl. With them, organizations gain rhythm, pace, and coherence. 

Portfolio visibility dashboards 

Clear visibility is one of the most effective tools leaders have. When progress, resourcing, and risks are easy to see, it becomes much simpler to understand what’s moving, what’s stuck, and where support is needed. Transparent dashboards bring this into one place, giving leaders a shared view of reality rather than relying on scattered updates or assumptions. 

Visibility also enables ownership. It strengthens accountability by making progress – or the lack of it – impossible to ignore. When the whole leadership team can see what’s happening, decisions become faster, more grounded, and far easier to align across the organization. 

Talent, incentives, and culture for a delivery organization 

Execution excellence is a human challenge as much as a structural one. Leaders who want to drive initiatives to the finish line must reshape the organizational behaviors that either fuel or fumble delivery. 

Reward completion and measurable impact 

If leaders are rewarded for launching initiatives, they will launch more. If they’re rewarded for outcomes, they will deliver more. 

This means shifting performance agreements and incentive plans to emphasize: 

• completion of high-priority initiatives 

• quantifiable impact 

• adoption and measurable results 

“Incentives play a big role in shaping culture,” says Ng. “If you reward outcomes instead of constant starts, leaders naturally shift their focus. Starting something new feels good. But finishing it, and being recognized for it, feels far better.” 

“Professionalize” delivery roles 

Project managers, program directors, change leaders, product owners, and transformation architects play a foundational role in execution. Yet many organizations treat these roles as stepping-stones rather than specialist careers. 

To inspire the best performance from these essential roles, leaders must elevate and recognize their professional value. This can be done in the following ways: 

• Create structured career paths 

• Invest in skills development 

• Position delivery roles as high-status, not administrative 

Create conditions for sustained performance 

One of the least discussed barriers to delivery is strain on core operations. As high-potential employees are put to work, critical functional areas often become thinly resourced. This can create operational instability that undermines both transformation and day-to-day business performance. 

Leaders can address this by: 

• Making sure important roles are properly staffed 

• Giving people a chance to rotate in and out of demanding roles, to prevent burnout 

• Protecting the capacity of teams that keep the business running 

• Building a stronger bench of future leaders 

“People can’t deliver at a high level if they’re constantly running on empty,” says Ng. “Leaders must protect capacity and create conditions where their teams can deliver well, week after week.” 

Redefine the cultural norm: “Stop starting, start finishing.” 

Culture is a powerful performance driver because where culture goes, people follow. Leaders set the tone of a delivery-oriented culture by: 

• Prioritizing a few things that matter, instead of trying to do everything at once 

• Being clear about precisely what needs to be done, and by whom 

• Making tough choices about what needs to pause or stop 

• Celebrating work that is actually completed, not just initiatives that have been launched 

Amazon’s “Two-Pizza Teams”: A delivery engine at scale 

Amazon’s “Two-Pizza Teams” operating model offers one of the clearest examples of an organization built for delivery. The structure is simple: keep teams small, give them clear ownership, and remove the friction that slows work down. 

• Small, autonomous teams 

Teams are intentionally kept small enough to be fed with two pizzas. Each one is cross-functional and owns a single product or capability end-to-end. This reduces coordination across departments and helps decisions move quickly. 

• Clear, single-threaded leadership 

Every major initiative has one accountable owner. This avoids decision-by-committee and ensures nothing loses momentum because ownership is diluted. 

• A focus on clarity before execution 

Before teams start building, they “work backwards” by writing a press release and FAQ for the finished product. This forces clarity on what value they are creating and how success will be defined, long before development begins. Written narratives replace slide decks and ensure alignment and rigorous thinking. 

• Speed that scales 

Despite its enormous size, Amazon teams are small, autonomous, and guided by clear thinking from the outset. This is how Amazon is able to deliver quickly at a scale few organizations can match.  

“Amazon’s two-pizza teams show how powerful small, accountable teams can be when they’re trusted to own the work from start to finish,” says Ng. “Agility comes naturally when leaders give people the clarity and autonomy they need to deliver well at scale.” 

Being organized is the difference between unrealized dreams and real delivery 

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” Jim Rohn’s words capture the heart of effective delivery. Organizations don’t succeed because of grand gestures or ambitious plans alone. They succeed because leaders commit to the steady practices that turn intent into outcomes. 

In closing, Ng says;

“None of this is complicated, but organizing for delivery does require discipline: the discipline to prioritize, to focus, and to follow through. Companies that deliver consistently aren’t necessarily the fastest-moving or the most innovative. They’re usually the ones that create the conditions for people to do meaningful work without unnecessary friction.” 

Today, the advantage goes to those who can finish what they start. Designing for delivery – not just ambition – is what turns vision into reality and builds the consistency that leaders depend on.