Deliverology in Practice: How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes

Everything you need to implement school change that gets results!

If you’ve been wondering how to effectively lead and manage results-driven, system-wide implementations, look no further. Internationally recognized education expert Michael Barber explores exactly how to translate policy into practice for long-term, measurable results.

Building on his groundbreaking book, Deliverology 101, Barber provides proven methods and clear steps to achieve successful policy implementation and offer practical solutions for reviving stalled reform efforts. New cases studies and embedded links help you develop a delivery "skillset" for building capacity, effective coalitions, and a coherent, flexible plan for implementation. 

Leaders and staff at both national and local levels will learn to:

• Establish a Delivery Unit to set clear, measureable goals and build a reform coalition 
• Understand delivery through data analysis and strategic progress monitoring 
• Plan for delivery with explicit, day-to-day implementation planning updated with proven methods from years of practice
• Drive delivery with progress monitoring, momentum building, and course corrections
• Create an irreversible delivery culture by identifying and addressing challenges as they occur

Don’t leave your education policy implementation to chance. Use this new field guide to get your implementation on the right track today!

Sir Michael Barber has been chief education advisor at Pearson since September 2011 and is the founder of Delivery Associates.

In 2001, he founded the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in No10, Downing Street, which he ran until 2005. In this role he was responsible for ensuring delivery of the government′s domestic policy priorities across health, education, crime reduction, criminal justice, transport and immigration. The sustained focus on delivery from the heart of government, and the processes the PMDU developed, were a significant innovation in government, of interest to numerous other countries and global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Tony Blair described the PMDU as “utterly invaluable.”

From 2005 to 2011 he was a partner at McKinsey and Company where he played a leading role in creating a public sector practice and founded the global education practice. In 2009 he founded, in Washington DC, the Education Delivery Institute, a not-for-profit organisation that works with more than a dozen US States to apply systematic delivery approaches to improving outcomes in schools and public higher education.

Since 2009, on behalf of the British government, he has visited Pakistan over 30 times to oversee a radical and, so far, successful reform of the Punjab education system. 

He is the author of numerous books and articles, such as How to Run a Government published by Penguin in 2015 and Instruction to Deliver (Methuen 2008), which tells the story of his time in Downing Street, and was described by the Financial Times as “one of the best books about British government for many years.” Deliverology 101 is the textbook on how to deliver in government and was written as the curriculum for the Education Delivery Institute.

Nick Rodriguez is the leader of the U.S. Education Delivery Institute’s K-12 practice. In this role, he is responsible for growing and maintaining a network of K-12 education leaders that are transforming the way they work to serve students. In his work at EDI, he has originated or helped to lead some of EDI’s longest-standing partnerships with education systems that are on the cutting edge of reform, including Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Hawai’i. These systems have successfully adopted the practices of Deliverology to achieve remarkable results for students in recent years.

A member of the organization’s founding leadership team, Nick began his work at EDI as its Program Director, where he helped to develop and continuously refine EDI’s tools for helping education leaders to adopt the delivery approach. Nick began his career in education over fifteen years ago when he served as the student member of the California State Board of Education and as a youth advocate and trainer with the California Association of Student Councils.  Prior to joining EDI, he was an engagement manager with McKinsey & Company’s education practice, where he advised education leaders on policy and implementation at the district, state, and national level in the U.S. and abroad. His previous books include “Deliverology 101,” a field guide that helped launch the movement to improve implementation in American education.

Ellyn Artis served as a founding partner for the Education Delivery Institute (EDI) where she now serves as the Director of Higher Education. She has a long history working with postsecondary and K-12 leaders to implement strategies that increase the numbers of students who graduate from high school college- and career-ready and complete a postsecondary credential―all while narrowing equity gaps. She leads the higher education team in their efforts to engage with campus, system, state, and nonprofit leaders in planning and implementing student success and completion strategies. This includes leaders from the California State University System, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, the Tennessee Board of Regents, and the University of Missouri System, amongst others.  Ellyn also supports campus leaders as they use Student Success ImpleMENTOR™ tools and resources to scale strategies and deliver improved retention and completion rates for all students. 

Prior to her time at EDI, Ellyn worked at The Education Trust where she was responsible for supporting higher education systems that agreed to halve their college-going and college-completion equity gaps as part of the Access to Success Initiative.  She also coached and advised an array of state and district leaders as part of the Strategic Consulting Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  She currently lives in the District of Columbia but is proud to hail from Flint, Michigan.