Job Description // Senior Delivery Manager

Objectives

As a Senior Delivery Manager you will:

1. Lead team performance and the effective delivery of complex, high-risk programmes and delivery for us and our clients.
2. Lead delivery management and foster best practice for us and our clients
3. Support us to build a profitable sales pipeline
4. Support our start-up mentality and work collaboratively to drive growth

Tasks

Tasks have been identified for each Objective.

1. Lead team performance and the effective delivery of complex, high-risk programmes and delivery for us and our clients.

• Agile and Lean practices. You know how to coach and lead teams in Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid and Lean practices. You are a recognised expert that advocates these approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team. You can create or tailor new ways of working; you are always innovating.
• Commercial management. You can take responsibility for complex relationships with contracted suppliers. You can identify appropriate contractual frameworks and identify appropriate suppliers. You know how to negotiate with contracted suppliers. You can get good value out of contracts and suppliers.
• Communication skills. You can mediate between people and mend relationships, communicating with stakeholders at all levels. You can manage stakeholder expectations and facilitate discussions about high risk and complexity even within constrained timescales. . You can speak and represent the community to large audiences inside and outside of government.
• Financial management. You know how to negotiate, influence or set budgets in complex environments. You can write or input into business cases and can communicate business-value propositions.
• Life-cycle perspective. You can apply experience of multiple parts of the product life cycle. You can recognise when it is right to move forward and when it is right to stop. You can recognise the appropriate deliverables and the right people to meet these. You are able to work with other agile delivery operations throughout the product life cycle. You can plan and engage with the appropriate stakeholders at a particular stage in the project.
• Maintaining delivery momentum. You know how to optimise the delivery flow of teams. You actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists. You can identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
• Making a process work. You can identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated. You can add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes. You know how to guide teams through the implementation of a new process.
• Planning. You know how to lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment. You can plan beyond product delivery. You can identify dependencies in plans across services and coordinate delivery. You know how to coach other teams as the central point of expertise.
• Team dynamics and collaboration. You can identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them. You can pull out issues through agile health-checks with the team and provoke the right responses. You can engage in varying types of feedback, choosing the right type at the appropriate time and ensuring the discussion and decision sticks. You can accelerate the team development cycle.

1. Lead delivery management and foster best practice for us and our clients

• Encourage and facilitate continuous improvement to drive collaboration, increase velocity and improve quality of delivery
• Share knowledge through coaching and mentoring
• Receive regular, glowing feedback
• Become a trusted and indispensable asset

1. Support us to build a profitable sales pipeline

• Support strategic market and account planning to drive business development
• Identify, shape and convert opportunities with existing clients
• Support business development activities including networking, thought leadership, tendering, pitching and horizon scanning to feed our sales pipeline

1. Support our start-up mentality and work collaboratively to drive growth

• Help define our vision and strategy as requested
• Track our internal objectives and key results (OKRs) as requested
• Be flexible and constantly look for opportunities to improve everything we do
• Build strong networks within ED to identify and collaborate on work others are leading

First client engagement

Your first assignment will be to provide oversight and leadership across 2 delivery teams at a large South Wales Government Department client:

1. The Delivery team are undergoing discovery, alpha and beta phases and form 1/5th of a broader transformation programme.
2. The Continuous Improvement (CI) team are improving a suite of private/public beta services as part of BAU operations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide relevant challenge, advice, and guidance to shape critical areas of the transformation planning (e.g. BCM, capability, commercial, operating model).
• Ensure successful completion of key phases, including Disco, Alpha and Beta.
• Implement embedded and effective knowledge management practices, including work shadowing, to reduce post-transformation risks.
• Identify, respond to, and appropriately escalate issues to ensure smooth delivery.
• Update, accurately maintain, and reflect the progress of Delivery and CI teams.
• Work with the product owner community and the full delivery ecosystem to accurately size product backlogs and create a consolidated delivery plan for the entire delivery landscape.
• Collaborate with service teams to ensure effective alignment between delivery plans for both program and BAU (business as usual) activities.
• Maintain delivery momentum by providing support within workstreams, ensuring teams work towards commitments made in planning ceremonies and addressing risks, dependencies, and issues promptly.
• Provide necessary support/challenge to delivery teams to resolve problems and issues in a timely manner.
• Support Empyrean sales pipeline by contributing to tenders and pitches.

Responsible for staff/equipment

• Staf: none
• Equipment: Laptop

Reporting to…

• Line Manager: Greg Clark, Product Director
• Development buddy: Neal Murray

Appendix // team culture

At empyrean digital, our ambition is to attract, develop and retain a diverse and talented team by:

• supporting a broad range of amazing clients
• undertaking interesting and ambitious projects
• building our own suite of products that add real value
• creating a real sense of team

Our team culture is at the heart of what we do and who we are at empyrean digital. We want to grow a team which embodies the following values and pulls together to deliver a world-class service for clients.

• Curious // You are inquisitive and dig a little deeper to win.
• Driven // You are dedicated and demand quality, with an infectious hunger for excellence that inspires others.
• Collaborative // You are honest and transparent, admit mistakes and proactively seek different perspectives.
• Brave // You trust your instincts, are open to possible failure and are prepared to make the right call for customers, every time.
• Innovative // You are open-minded, thrive on change, and prepared to challenge conventional wisdom.

In order to achieve this, we have a firm focus on employee engagement. This means:

• Making everyone feel valued and trusted
• Making everyone feel heard
• Making everyone feel empowered

1.  
2. Interactions with other team members:

• Look out for one another
• Give and receive feedback graciously and mindfully
• Celebrate success together

1.  
2. Practical steps to we take:

• Buddy system
• Regular team meetings and personal development sessions
• Team socials and games nights