Delivery Budgets and Behaviour Budgets

Every organisation has two budgets that determine whether they’ll deliver on their commitments.

Most only know about the first.

The delivery budget

Your delivery budget is simple: based on what your teams have actually delivered in the past, here’s what they can realistically deliver in the next period. Not what you’d like them to deliver. Not what they’ve committed to in a planning ceremony. What the data says they’ll deliver.

You can calculate it. Take your team’s historical throughput, run a Monte Carlo simulation, and you get a range: “We can deliver 8 items at 95% confidence, or 12 items at 85% confidence.” That’s your budget.

Spend it however you want. Prioritise ruthlessly. Put your highest-value work at the top. But you can’t spend more than you have.

If something new comes in and it’s urgent, fine — add it. But it doesn’t increase your budget. It pushes something else down. If you promote an item into the “will be delivered” category, something else drops into “may be delivered.” That’s not a failure. That’s a trade-off. That’s leadership.

The organisations that struggle most are the ones that refuse to acknowledge the budget exists. They commit to 20 items when the data says they can deliver 10. They call it ambition. The data calls it a coin flip. And then they’re surprised when half of it doesn’t land.

The behaviour budget

The delivery budget tells you what your teams can deliver. The behaviour budget tells you whether they will.

The behaviour budget is the collective behavioural multiplier across your organisation — the real culture, not the one on the careers page. It’s the sum of how decisions get made, how conflict gets handled, how risk gets surfaced, how people respond when something goes wrong.

Performance = Capability x Behaviours.

A delivery budget calculated from historical throughput assumes that behaviours stay roughly constant. But they don’t. They shift — sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight.

A restructure can slash the behaviour budget in a week. A toxic new leader can drain it over months. A culture of blame can erode it so slowly that nobody notices until the best people have already left.

When the behaviour budget drops, the delivery budget becomes fiction. Your Monte Carlo forecast is based on what the team delivered when they were engaged, communicating well, and willing to take risks. If those conditions have changed, the forecast is still mathematically sound — it’s just no longer measuring the same team.

Two budgets, one picture

The power is in seeing them together.

A healthy organisation has a realistic delivery budget and a strong behaviour budget. The forecast is reliable because the conditions that produced historical performance are still intact.

A struggling organisation typically has one of two problems:

1. No delivery budget. They’ve never calculated what they can actually deliver, so every quarter is a wish list. They commit to everything, deliver half of it, blame the teams, and repeat. The data to fix this exists — they’ve just never looked at it.

2. A collapsing behaviour budget. They might even have good delivery data, but the behaviours underneath are deteriorating. The forecast says they can deliver 10 items, but three senior engineers have gone quiet, two teams have stopped collaborating, and the last person who raised a concern in a planning meeting got publicly shut down. The capability hasn’t changed. The multiplier has.

The first problem is a data problem. The second is a leadership problem. Most organisations try to solve the second with more data, which is why nothing changes.

How to use this

For the delivery budget: look at what your teams have actually delivered over the last 8-10 weeks. Not what they estimated. Not what they committed to. What they shipped. That’s your starting point. If you want a proper forecast, run a Monte Carlo simulation — there are free tools for this. Even a rough forecast is infinitely more useful than none.

For the behaviour budget: start watching. Are people speaking up in planning? Is conflict being resolved or avoided? What happens when someone flags a risk? Are your best people engaged or coasting? These signals are visible to anyone paying attention. They just don’t have a dashboard.

Together, these two budgets tell you something no single metric can: not just what your organisation can deliver, but whether it actually will.

The delivery budget is built on data. The behaviour budget is built on observation. The work Kieran Neeson and I are doing at IMIRT sits at the intersection — bringing the same probabilistic thinking behind Expected Goals in football to both delivery forecasting and behavioural measurement.

Because a forecast without the behavioural context is just a number. And a number without context is just a more sophisticated way of guessing.