Delivery Principal

Krasan Consulting Services; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Krasan Consulting Services seeks a Delivery Principal to own and lead a portfolio of client engagements, ensuring health, execution, and outcomes. The role blends hands-on leadership with accountability for delivery across groups, including managed delivery, workstreams, and talent-only placements.

You will manage risks, surface opportunities, and maintain strong client relationships to drive renewal and growth.

Qualifications

• Lead delivery across multiple engagements and client relationships.
• Proven ability to turn around struggling engagements.
• Strong grasp of margin, burn, forecast, and change orders.
• Experience developing and mentoring other delivery leaders.

Responsibilities

• Provide delivery oversight for each engagement group with clear ownership and defined success measures.
• Serve as senior escalation point for delivery issues and implement recovery plans.
• Maintain direct relationships with delivery-side client stakeholders and surface renewal opportunities.
• Own delivery margin performance and coordinate with Client Engagement and Finance.
• Support pre-sales and solution shaping with delivery input before pursuits.
• Lead and develop the next layer of delivery leaders and set team norms.
• Allocate time between billable work, governance, and client leadership; balance capacity for engagement health.
• Ensure appropriate handoffs between Krasan and client organizations with clear documentation.

Skills

Delivery leadership

Client engagement

Financial management

People development

Job description

The Delivery Principal is the single accountable owner for the successful delivery of a defined group of client engagements. They are the person we expect to know the health of every engagement in their group, to step in and solve problems before they reach the client, and to be the escalation path when something goes wrong.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not an oversight role. The Delivery Principal stays close enough to the work to be credible with clients and useful to their teams, while holding accountability for outcomes across all of their assigned engagements.

Scope of responsibility

Each Delivery Principal is assigned a group of clients of mixed engagement types. A typical group includes some combination of:

• Managed delivery engagements, where Krasan owns scope, schedule, and the outcome
• Health measures: Scope, Schedule, Budget, Quality, Risk, Outcomes
• Work stream engagements, where Krasan owns a defined piece of a larger client program
• Health measures: Dependencies, Client Decisions, Integration, Milestones
• Talent Only placements, where Krasan supplies skilled people into client-run teams
• Health measures: Client Satisfaction, Consultant Experience, Performance Concerns, Retention, Extension or renewal risk

The mix matters because each type demands something different. Managed delivery needs project rigor. Workstreams need coordination with the client’s program leadership. Talent-only placements need attention to consultant performance, experience, and continuity, with renewal risks surfaced to Client Engagement.

Every engagement has a named delivery owner appropriate to its type and size. Managed delivery and workstream engagements have an engagement manager or project lead. For talent-only placements, the Delivery Principal provides direct consultant support and maintains contact with delivery-side client stakeholders to address performance and continuity. Client Engagement retains ownership of the overall account relationship and all commercial activity.

The Delivery Principal is accountable for all of it. The group is sized by the attention it requires, not by headcount alone, and is adjusted as work is won, expanded, renewed, and closed.

Sizing the group to the person

The size and complexity of the group is deliberately variable, and title follows scope. A highly experienced Delivery Principal can carry a larger, more complex group at a more senior title. Someone newer to the role starts with a smaller group at a correspondingly lower one. The role therefore spans more than one tier rather than sitting at a single fixed grade.

This is intentional on three counts. It lets us hire at the level of the person we find rather than forcing a fit. It sets someone up to succeed instead of overloading them on day one. And it creates a visible growth path, where a Delivery Principal who demonstrates they can handle more takes on more, with the title moving accordingly.

Core responsibilities

Delivery oversight

• Know the real status and health of every engagement in the group, not the reported status, using health measures appropriate to its delivery model
• Ensure each engagement has clearly assigned ownership, documented expectations, appropriate success measures, and an agreed escalation path. Managed delivery engagements and workstreams must also have defined scope, delivery governance, and an agreed definition of done. Review engagement health on a set cadence and surface risk early, in writing, before it becomes an issue
• Hold project-based teams to consistent delivery practices: planning, status reporting, change control, and quality. For talent-only engagements, ensure consistent consultant support and performance feedback, and communicate continuity and renewal risks to Client Engagement.
• Ensure delivery, staffing, scope, and accountability handoffs between Krasan and the client are clearly understood and appropriately documented

Problem solving and escalation

• Serve as the senior delivery-side escalation point for engagement teams and for clients
• Diagnose the actual problem when an engagement is struggling, which is often scope, staffing, client decision-making, or expectations rather than effort
• Say so plainly when the real cause is effort, performance, or capability on the team, and work with the capability lead to address it rather than quietly compensating for it
• Step directly into a troubled engagement assuming temporary delivery leadership and establishing an explicit recovery structure
• Decide when to bring in additional help, and pull the right capability lead, architect, or executive into the room
• Escalate to the ED of Delivery with a recommendation, not just a report

Client relationship

• Establish and maintain a direct, standing relationship with the delivery-side client stakeholders on every engagement in the group
• Lead regular delivery-side client check-ins covering delivery performance, planned delivery activities, risks, and decisions needed. Coordinate with Client Engagement on matters affecting the broader account relationship or commercial commitments.
• Be a clearly identified senior escalation contact for delivery concerns and own coordination of the response
• Identify potential growth, extension, and renewal opportunities and provide delivery context to Client Engagement, which owns qualification, commercial discussions, and negotiations.
• Protect the Krasan relationship when an engagement is at risk due to delivery by ensuring early candor, clear ownership, and decisive corrective action

Commercial and financial

• Be accountable for delivery margin performance across assigned engagements, in partnership with Client Engagement and Finance. Manage delivery cost and execution within approved commercial terms; Client Engagement owns pricing and commercial commitments.
• Review forecast, burn, remaining budget, and margin for project-based engagements, and revenue, margin, utilization, continuity, and replacement risks for talent-only engagements on a monthly cadence. Act on delivery variances and surface extension and renewal risks to Client Engagement.
• Identify the need for a change order and define its delivery rationale, estimates, staffing needs, and impact. Client Engagement leads pricing, contractual discussions, and the approval process. Perform additional work only after required approvals are obtained.
• Support estimation, delivery modeling, and staffing plans for new or expanded work, and validate delivery feasibility before Client Engagement makes commercial commitments.

Pre-sales and solution shaping

• Partner with Client Engagement and sales on pursuits where the Delivery Principal is expected to retain delivery accountability, providing delivery expertise before the work is sold. Client Engagement leads the pursuit and commercial relationship.
• Help shape the team model for proposed work: roles, seniority mix, ramp, and how the engagement will actually be run
• Pressure-test estimates, assumptions, and timelines so what is committed is deliverable
• Identify delivery risk in proposed scope or contract structure and provide recommendations to Client Engagement for resolution before signature.
• Participate in client-facing pursuit conversations to explain delivery approach, staffing, assumptions, and risks. Coordinate with Client Engagement, which owns commercial discussions and commitments.
• Ensure a controlled transition from solutioning to engagement mobilization, including documented assumptions, commitments, risks, commercial constraints, and staffing plans.
• Early involvement is deliberate. A Delivery Principal who helped shape the engagement is positioned in the structure from the start, which makes their ongoing role in the delivery clear and supportable.

Team leadership

• Provide delivery leadership to the engagement managers and project leads assigned to the group, including goal setting and regular one-on-ones
• Ensure meaningful, evidence-based delivery feedback is collected for consultants across the group, and provide direct input where the Delivery Principal has sufficient firsthand knowledge
• Partner with resource management and capability leads to place the right people on the right engagements at the right time, and surface staffing risks early
• Coach and develop the next layer of delivery leaders
• Set the tone for how Krasan teams show up with clients

Time allocation and billing

• The role is expected to start fully non-billable so the Delivery Principal can establish coverage, governance, and delivery leadership across assigned engagements. A future billable ceiling of up to 50% may be considered with Client Engagement based on engagement mix, capacity, and contract structure. Any billable work must be supported by the contract and preserve sufficient capacity to cover the full group.
• The remaining time is what makes the role work. It buys the capacity to drop into a troubled engagement on short notice, hold regular client conversations that are not tied to a billable task, review engagement health across the whole group, and develop the engagement managers underneath.
• Pre-sales and solution shaping work is part of this picture as well. Where a Delivery Principal is involved in shaping an engagement and is reflected in its structure, that involvement should be accounted for in how the engagement is built.
• A Delivery Principal who is consistently billing above the target has usually stopped covering their group and started running one engagement. That is the signal to rebalance, not a reason to raise the target.

Boundaries with adjacent roles

The Delivery Principal works closely with engagement managers, capability leads, and Client Engagement. The Delivery Principal owns delivery performance, delivery-side stakeholder relationships, and delivery escalations. Client Engagement owns the overall account relationship, commercial strategy, pipeline, pricing, contracts, and renewal or expansion negotiations. Delivery involvement in pursuits, change requests, and renewals supports Client Engagement and does not transfer commercial ownership.

Role

The Delivery Principal will own:

• Engagement manager / project lead
• Day-to-day execution of one project: plan, team, status, client working relationship
• The outcome across all engagements in the group, and support when an engagement needs more than its manager can bring
• Capability lead
• Our people and skills: hiring standards, career paths, training, bench readiness
• How those people perform on the work, with formal input into their reviews
• Client Engagement
• Overall account relationship, commercial strategy, pipeline, pricing, contracts, and renewal or expansion negotiations
• Delivery performance and delivery-side stakeholder relationships; delivery input to pursuits, change requests, and renewals; early handoff of commercial risks and opportunities to Client Engagement
• The Delivery Principal does not replace the engagement manager on a healthy engagement. The expectation is support and oversight by default, and direct intervention by exception.

Qualifications and experience

Required

• Significant experience leading client-facing delivery in a consulting or professional services environment
• A track record of owning multiple concurrent engagements, not just one at a time
• Demonstrated ability to turn around a struggling engagement
• Comfort holding a difficult conversation with a client executive and keeping the relationship intact
• Working command of delivery financials: margin, burn, forecast, and change orders
• Experience leading and developing other delivery leaders

Preferred

• Experience across more than one delivery model, including managed delivery and Talent only
• Public sector or regulated-industry delivery experience
• Enough technical depth to ask the right questions and judge technical risk

Background

This role can be filled by someone with a technical background or someone who came up through project and program management. Technical depth is useful but not required. What is required is the ability to run a group of engagements, read a situation quickly, and carry client confidence.

A Delivery Principal without deep technical background needs a defined technical escalation path, normally a capability lead or senior architect, so technical risk on an engagement never sits unseen.

How success is measured

What it tells us

• Client satisfaction across the group
• Whether clients would hire us again and refer us
• Margin performance across the group
• Whether the work is delivered profitably, not just delivered
• Engagement commitments achieved by delivery model
• Managed delivery: on time, on scope, quality, budget
• Talent only: client satisfaction, consultant performance, continuity, retention, extension or renewal
• Whether commitments are met without quiet scope erosion
• Material risks surfaced early, communicated transparently, and resolved at the appropriate level
• Whether problems are being surfaced or discovered
• Retention and growth of consultants in the group
• Whether people want to keep working on this team
• Readiness of the engagement managers underneath
• Whether the role is building the next layer of leaders
• Individual billable utilization is tracked but is not a primary measure for this role. The group's performance is.