The Head of Delivery is responsible for maintaining, evolving, and improving the approach to agile delivery at Made Tech. The Head of Delivery leads and supports a team of Delivery Managers.
Our Delivery Managers are accountable for the effective delivery of complex, high-risk products and services. They have strong communication skills and are comfortable engaging with senior stakeholders. They typically manage one or two agile projects as part of a highly skilled, multidisciplinary team.
Made Tech are experiencing a period of rapid growth and are scaling quickly to keep pace with demand. We are working with larger-scale projects and an increasing number of stakeholders, resulting in the expansion of the current delivery function. We have identified that a new, senior layer within the function is needed to ensure consistent direction, free up the delivery teams and provide a clear line of contact for client relationships.
As a result, we are looking for an experienced Head of Delivery to truly own the delivery practice at Made Tech, to support and nurture a growing team of Delivery Managers, and to continue to evolve, improve, and scale how we work.
You'll ensure teams are focused on delivering customer success, are applying the most appropriate agile tools and techniques, and are delivering in line with The Made Tech Way.
You'll support teams navigate more complex situations by drawing on your experience to ensure roadblocks are removed before they become significant impediments.
You will identify training needs and provide coaching to customers and team members where necessary. Using retrospectives, pair programming and feedback loops, you will facilitate continuous improvement, nurturing your team's capabilities and promoting appropriate agile and lean techniques and tools.
You will focus on improving the delivery team's ability to meet deadlines and adhere to the roadmap by diplomatically protecting them from outside influences and unnecessary distractions, such as ad hoc client meetings or excessive time spent in stand-ups; instead, engaging the teams with the clients in more structured processes such as workshops, sprint planning, daily scrums, show and tells, retros, etc.
You must have client-facing experience and a proven track record of working with customers to build delivery roadmaps. We'll want to discuss previous roadmap processes you have been a part of, including how you helped to distil key client objectives into epics and user stories.
Communication will be key to your success, so you should feel comfortable presenting to and negotiating with senior stakeholders in a professional manner, so that the needs of everyone involved in a project are kept in balance, whilst mediating disputes when required.
Whilst we are an agile software development company and truly believe in the benefits of an agile mindset, we are also aware that not all companies have bought in to the process to the same extent. As a result, you will need to be flexible in adapting delivery style to meet the specific needs of each client and we will want to hear about times that you have applied that flexibility previously, and the benefits that it brought.
Additionally, you will have a good understanding of the pros and cons of using Scrum and other agile methodologies, particularly when it comes to coaching and empowering delivery teams. You should be able to provide examples of when having a Scrum approach has become problematic for a team and how you helped them to overcome those issues.
As you will be adopting a servant leader approach to management in this role we will want to hear about how you have worked this way within previous teams, particularly focusing on how you have encouraged servant leadership and why you believe it is a beneficial model for team management.
You should have experience managing a budget effectively, preferably using a T&M approach. We will want to discuss how you have approached budget management in the past and would love to hear of projects that you budgeted which exceeded the customer's expectations in terms of what they received within their financial constraints.
You will take ownership of the delivery function of a company that is rapidly scaling to meet increased customer demand, giving you exposure to a huge variety of enterprise-level, highly complex programmes with ever evolving challenges, whilst getting to work with a wealth of market-leading companies.
As a technologically driven company that espouses best practice and aims to become a Thought Leader within the world of software delivery, Made Tech will provide you the opportunity to use the most exciting new technologies and to work in an environment where we are always striving to stay on the cutting-edge of market trends and processes.
You'll have the chance to develop and adapt our agile processes, coaching both internal and external teams on best practice and designing workshops for building capabilities within customer organisations.
Finally, as we continue to grow rapidly there are a wealth of directions that a driven individual can progress to within the company, depending on their personal interests.
We are a technology focussed business that values continuous improvement, experimentation, trusting individuals and teams to do the right thing.
We are a growing business and now is a good time to join us as there is great opportunity to have a massive impact on the business and grow with us too.
This role has a salary of £80-95k depending on experience.
We expect our Head of Delivery through line management to hire, coach, and nurture a team of Delivery Managers to deliver successful engagements for all of Made Tech's customers.
We expect our Head of Delivery to be highly adept at succesfully resolving complex and sometimes conflict situations. The Head of Delivery is expected to proactively identify and help resolve situations that post a potential threat to Made Tech.
We expect our Head of Delivery to ensure Engagement Leads are equipped and held to account to deliver regular engaging and valuable reporting materials to our customers and the Made Tech leadership team.
We expect our Head of Delivery to be the guardian of The Made Tech Way - the guide for how we successfully engage with customers. The Head of Delivery should be regularly introspecting with the Engagement Lead community to identify how we can evolve and improve our way of engaging customers.
We expect our Head of Delivery to represent the Made Tech delivery practice in sales activity to develop delivery plans, leading scoping, and selling Made Tech's capability.
We expect our Head of Delivery to get hands-on and support Delivery Managers in booting up successful deliveries, helping to ensure good practices are embedded in the team from day one, and that the customer has a high degree of confidence in Made Tech.
We expect our Delivery Managers to ensure epics are ready for teams to begin work on with no known blockers. We expect Delivery Managers to work with customers and the team to transform the customer's high level business objectives in to a roadmap with at least 3 months runway.
We expect our Delivery Managers to nurture a culture of high performance in their teams. Where customers do not provide adequate pressure to deliver, we expect our Delivery Managers to constructively challenge our teams. It is important that we're doing the right thing for our customers: delivering valuable, working software as expediently as we're able.
We expect our Delivery Managers to proactively manage and mitigate risks to our deliveries and customer relationships. We expect our Delivery Managers to ensure the customer is delighted with what we deliver for their budget.
We expect our Delivery Managers to work with customers and Account Leads to the define the frequency and type of reporting that will be most valuable to them.
We expect our Delivery Managers to facilitate a regular dialogue with their Account Lead to ensure both parties are abreast of relevant account and delivery activity.
We expect our Delivery Managers to ensure teams are delivering with acceptable levels of quality. We expect Delivery Managers to encourage their team to identify and proactively 'pull' from others when they need testing support. We expect Delivery Managers to not provide a safety net to their team by automatically testing features.
We expect our Delivery Leads to naturally position themselves as the day to day point of contact for the customer. A Delivery Lead is expected to gain the trust of the customer such that they’re seen as the first port of call for all customer contacts.
We expect our Delivery Leads to understand the financial constraints, as well as the customer objectives for the delivery. A Delivery Lead is accountable for ensuring the customer’s expectations are exceeded for the available budget.
We expect our Delivery Leads to assume ultimate responsibility for the successful delivery of customer engagements. The performance of the team and the delivery as a whole is understood as the Delivery Lead’s responsibility.
We expect our Delivery Leads to proactively provide regular reporting to the Directors on the health of their delivery.
We expect our Delivery Leads to be the guardians of the Made Tech Delivery Standards, ensuring the team understands and is proactively practising them. A Delivery Lead is expected to encourage conversation on both more widely evolving the Delivery Standards, and ahead of deciding to follow a different path on their delivery.
We expect our Delivery Leads to take accountability for ensuring the customer is delighted with the quality of our delivery to the level that they would not hesitate to recommend Made Tech to their peers.
We expect our Delivery Leads to demonstrate strong diplomacy when protecting their team from influences that may impact the team’s ability to deliver its objectives and commitments.
We expect our Delivery Leads to ensure the team is actively collaborating and communicating, both between team members and with the customer. A Delivery Lead is expected to ensure the team have a shared understanding of what is most important to the customer.
Coach team members and customers, facilitate continuous improvement, and apply the most appropriate agile and lean tools and techniques for their environment
We expect our Delivery Leads to be an expert in the application of agile and lean practices. A Delivery Lead is expected to understand the most appropriate methods to apply given the situation. A Delivery Lead is expected to coach team members and customers on the application of lean and agile practices.