Executive-level delivery governance without the overhead of a full-time hire
The Retainer is ongoing fractional PMO leadership on a 90-day renewable basis. One or 1.5 days per week. Direct reporting to the founder, COO, or CFO. Your vendors are held accountable. Your delivery outcomes are predictable.
When delivery governance is missing, the vendor fills the vacuum. They run the status meetings, control the reporting, and define what on track means. Leadership gets a filtered view of program health and makes decisions based on it.
The result is predictable. Milestones slip. Budget requests arrive without a verified path to the original business case. By the time the gap is visible, it has been visible to the vendor for weeks.
The Retainer puts independent delivery governance in place before the gap becomes a crisis.
The Fractional PMO Lead retainer provides executive-level delivery oversight on a part-time basis. This is not project management at the task level. It is governance above the technical stack: the accountability layer between your vendors and your leadership team.
Attendance at vendor meetings. Translation of technical status into business risk. Audit of Statements of Work against actual delivery. When a vendor says the program is on track, you have an independent view of whether it is.
Verification of production-readiness before deliverables are accepted. Monitoring of output against contractual commitment. Early identification of delivery slippage before it reaches the budget or the board.
A single, consolidated view of delivery health across all active initiatives. Board-ready reporting on demand. Your Transformation Readiness Scorecard™ maintained in real time so leadership always has an accurate picture.
All parties held to the original business case. Every decision mapped back to Revenue Realization. Issues escalated before they become emergencies, not after.
An outside party calls out underperformance without internal political pressure. Your vendors know the governance is independent. It changes the dynamic.
90-day renewable terms keep the engagement focused on immediate outcomes. No open-ended scope. No billing for relationship maintenance. Delivery accountability, measured against what was agreed.
Senior delivery leadership experience applied at a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive hire. The same governance capability a large enterprise builds into its PMO, sized for an organization running 3 to 20 concurrent initiatives.
"Having an expert in the room who speaks the vendor's language changed the dynamic instantly. We stopped getting excuses and started getting deliverables."
- CTO, Retail
THIS IS FOR YOU IF:
Your transformation is in flight and you are not confident the reporting you are receiving reflects the actual state of delivery. You are a founder or COO spending time in technical meetings at the expense of strategic priorities. Vendor accountability is slipping and you lack the governance infrastructure to enforce the contract. You need delivery oversight but are not ready to commit to a full-time internal hire.
THIS IS NOT FOR YOU IF:
Your program has not started yet. (See The Build.) Your program is in active failure and needs immediate stabilization. (See Emergency Services.) You are looking for task-level project management rather than executive governance.
The Retainer runs on a 90-day renewable basis.
Two commitment levels are available: Light (one day per week) and Standard (one and a half days per week).
Scope is defined at the start of each term.
Renewal decisions are made 30 days before the term ends, based on delivery outcomes and the next 90-day priorities.
All engagements are corp-to-corp. No T4 or payroll arrangements.
A 30-minute call is enough to determine which commitment level fits your current portfolio and what governance looks like in the first 30 days.
Because strategy is a theory. Delivery is the reality.
Delivery Is the Strategy™ | cosmina@deliveryisthestrategy.ca | linkedin.com/in/cosmina-buiga
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