Delivery can spark rapid improvements, but lasting change depends on what it leaves behind.
Delivery is often credited with driving rapid improvements, but do those improvements last? Can they survive changes in leadership, funding cycles, or shifting political priorities?
That’s our job: equipping governments with the skills to deliver better for citizens, even after we’ve left.
Three core elements help delivery lead to long-term impact:
1. Shifting people’s expectations
The core of lasting delivery comes from changing what people expect from public services. When citizens and governments become accustomed to improvements, they notice, and become intolerant of a return to lower standards.
Higher expectations create a form of pressure that helps keep delivery alive even after leadership changes. When services slip, there is public and political demand to return to previous performance levels, or better. This makes reforms harder to reverse and builds an engine for continued progress.
2. Building capacity for ministries
Aside from changing expectations, the most sustainable delivery efforts are those that strengthen the ability of ministries to implement effectively on their own. Instead of just improving outcomes in the short term, this means helping teams adopt better ways of working, use data more effectively, and respond more confidently to challenges.
When delivery efforts come directly from external teams or consultants without building internal capability, results often disappear once support is withdrawn. But when the ministries gain experience in setting goals, solving problems, and tracking performance, they are more likely to sustain and replicate success over time. Then it doesn’t matter if a delivery team like ours steps back.
3. Making data visible
Transparency plays a key role in sustaining delivery. When performance data is collected, shared, and discussed publicly, it increases accountability across the system. Officials are more likely to act, managers are more likely to monitor, and citizens are more likely to engage.
Public data also ensures that delivery efforts don’t disappear quietly. When targets, results, and trends are out in the open, they create a track record that shapes how governments and communities view progress, and what they’re willing to accept. Without public data, people’s expectations cannot shift.
The Real Legacy of Delivery
In the end, sustainable delivery is not about preserving delivery teams for the sake of it. It’s about investing in the people, habits, and expectations that allow improvement to continue on its own. When delivery efforts focus on building lasting capacity, raising expectations, and making performance visible, they are far more likely to create change that sticks.
To learn more about delivery, read our recent piece about the core ingredients needed to start.
