Senior Agile Delivery Manager
- Blackpool, (GBR)
- £450 - £500 Per Day
- 3 Months
- Start date: ASAP
- Ref: 7071a
- programme management
- service management
- Agile
- testing standards
- infrastructure engineering
- Solution Architect
- financial management
- software engineering
- product design
- commercial management
A Senior Agile Delivery Manager will typically be assigned to high risk and/or complex delivery and will also be an experienced agile coach to the wider community.
Their responsibilities are:
- Ensure a good, sustainable product delivery pace is maintained for complex and/or high risk delivery which is geared around achieving tested quality outcomes for citizens and DWP.
- Ensure effective agile techniques and ceremonies are used by the team. Coach the team in agile practices including those relating to software engineering, testing and user centred design processes. Coach/mentor less experienced Agile Delivery Managers in agile techniques.
- Lead effective, collaborative and dynamic planning activities for complex and/or high risk delivery. In doing so help team members prioritise the work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team.
- Surface and ensure prompt resolution of blockers for the team for complex and/or high risk delivery. Act as the owner of “blockers” even when resolution may sit with others at any level in the organisation. Equally ensure risks are surfaced and mitigated.
- Work with the product owner (in collaboration with others) to define the road map for products and services and work with the team to translate that into an achievable backlog. This may be for complex/high risk products.
- Help the product owner set priorities for the team and draw contributions from team members to ensure there is a clear understanding of what is achievable
- Keep track of the team’s progress against achieving defined outcomes and collaboratively adjust plans where necessary. Typical this will be for complex/high risk delivery.
- Communicate delivery status to the team and to genuine stakeholders and assurance bodies - adapting communication appropriately to audience.
- Lead the formation and evolution of team membership to optimise successful delivery.
- Ensure great team dynamics and a positive working environment. Typically this will be for complex/high risk delivery.
- Monitor and feed into the business case at various stages throughout the Project lifecycle.
- Ensure funding is in place and track spending and forecasts regularly and accurately.
- Effectively manage suppliers to optimise value
- Ensure external assurance groups are appropriately engaged and that formal approvals do not represent significant risk to meeting outcomes.
- Ensure the effective delivery of external dependencies on behalf of the team.
- Ensure external teams that have dependencies on their team are properly engaged and aware of current delivery status.
- Ensure the team has the right working environment and tools needed
- Outside of their immediate team also coach other teams, peers and senior managers in agile practices in the context of the DWP target operating model.
- Be an accessible experienced agile coach within the DWP Delivery Manager community to improve others’ learning and to set standards for delivery.
PLANNING, TEAM DYNAMICS AND COLLABORATION.
Able to:
• Lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment.
• Plan beyond product delivery.
• Provide delivery confidence.
• Identify dependencies in plans across services and coordinate delivery. Coaches other teams as the central point of expertise.
• Identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them.
• Pull out issues through agile health-checks with the team and provoke the right responses.
• Engage in varying types of feedback choosing the right type at the appropriate time and ensuring the discussion and decision sticks.
• Accelerate the team development cycle.
AGILE AND LEAN PRACTICES, EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION AND MAKING THE PROCESS WORK:
• Coaches and leads teams in agile and lean practices. Is a recognised expert that advocates these approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team.
• Creates or tailors new ways of working and is always innovating.
• Able to facilitate difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.
• Able to provide succinct updates to senior stakeholders in a way that meets their needs.
• Ensures a single view of the project status is shared both internally and externally.
• Able to communicate metrics such as team health and the product delivery in a user-friendly way.
• Able to identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated.
• Able to add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes. Guides teams through the implementation of a new process.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN.
• Has a software engineering degree OR some hands on experience working as a developer OR substantial experience working directly with developers to understand and assist in delivery of detailed coding tasks that are typically less than 2 days duration OR been a successful Agile Delivery Manager.
• Understands and appreciates Software and Infrastructure Engineering at task level including basic Solution Architecture and Software Development Lifecycle.
• Familiar with secure coding & testing standards/best practices.
• Ability to assist in the allocation of work to optimise productivity.
• Has a good understanding of Enterprise Architecture. Has demonstrable experience of having worked as a Delivery Manager or relevant role in an enterprise product environment.
• Understands delivery dimensions of customer-centric product design at both strategic and task level including service design, user research, business analysis and data analysis. Aware of standards, methods, tools, etc
MAINTAINING DELIVERY MOMENTUM AND LIFECYCLE PERSPECTIVE.
Able to:
• Optimise the delivery flow of teams.
• Actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists.
• Identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
• Apply experience of multiple parts of the lifecycle.
• Recognise when it’s right to move forward and when it’s right to stop.
• Recognise the appropriate deliverables and the right people to meet these.
• Work with other agile delivery operations throughout the product lifecycle.
• Plan and engage with the appropriate stakeholders at a particular stage in the project.
COMMERCIAL AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT:
Able to
• Act as the escalation point and resolve large or high risk commercial management issues.
• Coach others in appropriate commercial management.
• Balance money vs value.
• Consider the impact of user needs.
• Report on financial delivery.
• Monitor cost and budget and escalate issues.
TECHNICAL SERVICE MANAGEMENT AND WATERFALL PROJECT & PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT:
• Managing a live technical support team at task level. Understands ITIL service management and able to integrate agile delivery with change, release and support processes.
• Has managed digital waterfall projects that were part of a large programme through the full lifecycle and has managed the interfaces with the programme.
Desirable
• Designing enterprise and/or solutions architecture
** for IR35 purposes, this role is in scope**
A Senior Agile Delivery Manager is accountable for effective, cross-functional delivery of complex, high risk products using agile/lean techniques.
They have an extensive understanding of software development, business operational process design, non-digital artefact design (e.g. paper forms), user research, user experience design and aspects of policy development.
They apply this to help dynamically organise delivery activities at a detailed level.
They are the experienced leader of advanced agile/lean techniques within their team and are tasked with empowering the team to self-organise effectively to optimise their chances of success. Critically they are accountable for setting a good, sustainable delivery pace in a complex environment.
They apply good agile delivery practice for planning, tracking progress, managing blockers, financial management, scope management, resource management, stakeholder management and governance. Their remit includes coaching less experienced Agile Delivery Managers in agile/lean techniques.
They are accountable for efficient integration with other (agile or non-agile) delivery teams and departmental governance.
They are experts in resolving conflict and encouraging collaboration.
