WHAT DOES A DELIVERY LEAD DO?
Published: Oct 14, 2024 - The Delivery Lead provides vision, leadership, and direction across the group to ensure the alignment of projects and products with overall design and technology objectives. This role encompasses establishing delivery goals and strategies while partnering with various teams for effective tracking and management of cross-functional projects. By overseeing the coordination of related projects and supporting internal systems development, the Delivery Lead fosters a culture of continuous improvement and compliance within the organization.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Delivery Lead
1. Delivery Lead Duties
- Delivery Management: Accountable for overall delivery across 3-5 squads.
- Collaboration: Work in close collaboration with Product and Engineering to drive a high-performing team containing all the required skills and capabilities by executing the backlog.
- Goal Setting: Set achievable goals and embed good processes and best practices to keep the teams moving forward to meet customer needs.
- Metrics Review: Actively review metrics of squads' delivery to improve and maximize velocity.
- Escalation Management: Act as an escalation point for team blockers or impediments to speed delivery.
- Value Delivery: Champion and facilitate the breaking down of deliverables into thin vertical slices to enable early and iterative delivery of value.
- Progress Tracking: Visualize the work of the teams to track and ensure sustainable progress.
- Documentation: Document the work of the teams, including roadmaps and plans, and ensure user stories and code documentation are lightweight but of the highest quality.
- Risk Management: Ensure risks and issues are clearly tracked and owned.
- Team Alignment: Make sure the team is lined up behind clear goals and running the processes that allow the team to deliver quickly.
- Agile Advocacy: Act as an advocate for Agile ways of working to ensure maximum value to the customer.
- Agile Development: Develop self and teams in Agile, keeping up to date with the latest best practices.
- Practice Facilitation: Responsible for the ways of working in the team, facilitating agile practice, and helping the team reflect on and improve how they work.
- Responsibility Clarity: Agree on responsibilities, tasks, and expectations with the team so everyone is clear on their contribution.
- Scrum Role Management: Step into Scrum roles with squads.
2. Delivery Lead Details
- Delivery Management: Drive delivery and execution of project portfolio to agreed milestones.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Ensure key stakeholders are engaged throughout.
- Vendor Management: Set out vendor requirements and SLAs and manage performance on a routine basis, with escalation for non-delivery or underperformance.
- Collaboration: Develop relationships with technical teams and business areas to ensure project requirements are captured, scoped, and milestones agreed upon.
- Status Reporting: Report status to the Technical Leadership team, escalating issues and concerns as they arise.
- Prioritization: Re-prioritize delivery in line with changes in demand, capacity, and capability, ensuring stakeholders are engaged with changes.
- Escalation Management: Track and manage actions and escalations to ensure timely resolution.
- Continuous Improvement: After delivery, provide lessons learned and activity-based actions to improve the department's delivery capabilities.
- Planning and Communication: Lead robust daily planning and communication processes to ensure stakeholders are aware of priorities and focus.
- Meeting Preparation: Prepare reports for project meetings, such as SteerCo.
- Team Development: Develop team capability through internal growth opportunities, external training, and deploying industry best practices.
3. Delivery Lead Responsibilities
- Resource Management: Responsible for staff augmentation and resource management.
- Client Satisfaction: Accountable for overseeing the results of project teams and ensuring client satisfaction at the end-user level.
- Project Leadership: Responsible for the administrative/operational leadership of a project within the program guidelines set by the Solution Capability lead and Shared Services Director.
- Customer Experience: Manage the customer experience and mobilization activities related to Shared Services for ServiceNow.
- Service Stability: Key responsibility/accountability for the stability and availability of ServiceNow in the Service Center and assigned Client Projects aligned to the Service Center Capability.
- Agile Facilitation: Facilitating agile ceremonies and workshops to support progress towards business outcomes.
- Agile Project Management: Managing agile projects, coaching, and leading a cross-functional team.
- Scrum Support: Supporting the scrum with backlog refinement, identification of goals, and engagement of key stakeholders.
- Progress Reporting: Preparing progress reports for leadership, outlining team progress, sprint burn-downs, risks and issues, and achievements.
- System Integration: Oversee and be accountable for the delivery of system integration and/or AO of healthcare platform/products such as TriZetto Facets, QNXT.
- Pre-Sales Support: Provide pre-sales and business development support on RFPs and proactive conversations around Facets with clients and internal leadership.
- Team Upskilling: Contribute to training to upskill team members on the platform/product.
- Communication Planning: Develop communication plans and interface with matrix teams, IT leadership, business leadership, and external vendors/partners.
- Project Tracking: Track and monitor the progress of key projects/programs and their associated milestones, recommending adjustments.
- Trusted Advisor: Become a proactive trusted advisor to the business by developing relationships with key business and IT matrix partners.
4. Delivery Leader Accountabilities
- Vision Leadership: Provides vision, leadership, and direction across the group in the development and alignment of projects and products for overall design/technology and related business operations to ensure objectives are met, applying agile and lean principles.
- Executive Leadership: Provides leadership to executive management in establishing overall delivery goals, objectives, and strategies within the organizational plan.
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Partners and coordinates with other groups on tracking, reporting, and managing cross-functional projects, requirements, and deliverables.
- Stakeholder Communication: Ensures appropriate levels of communication regarding strategies, programs, and initiatives with stakeholders, managers, and employees for awareness, understanding, alignment, and proper management.
- Capacity Planning: Provides analyses and guidance on capacity, team design, and resources required for delivery, as well as stakeholder management.
- Delivery Oversight: Leads the executive oversight of the delivery approach, including methods, tracking, and communication within and outside the group.
- Project Leadership: Leads or coaches large, complex, or sensitive projects for the group.
- Project Coordination: Oversees or supports the coordination and management of related projects through the team.
- Systems Development: Leads internal systems development to support delivery, management, and reporting.
- Operational Reporting: Oversees monthly operational reports to be standardized and distributed.
- Policy Compliance: Ensures the development, implementation, and interpretation of policies and procedures and compliance with applicable laws, rules, and regulations, receiving legal guidance and interpretation.
5. Delivery Lead Functions
- Team Management: Manage a cross-functional team of analysts, developers, and testers to deliver the company’s change agenda in line with SDLC practices and processes.
- Technical Leadership: Provide subject matter expertise and technical direction and guidance for the implementation team.
- Project Management: Work on projects that span a broad range of applications.
- Estimation and Planning: Create and share implementation estimates and operational requirements to enable accurate planning with realistic timelines.
- Technical Coordination: Coordinate from a technical perspective the analysis, design, development, implementation, and testing of new features/projects within the implementation team.
- Liaison: Serve as a liaison between business partners and vendors in coordination with the Technical Architect to provide technical solutions for projects.
- Design Patterns: Make use of design patterns and best practices.
- Technical Collaboration: Participate in discussions with architects and other team members to find the best technical solutions.
- Technical Alignment: Be actively involved in technical alignment between multiple technologies—regarding strategies and best practices.
- Release Planning: Contribute to and review deployment and release plans.
- Risk Advisory: Advise on options, risks, costs versus benefits, system impacts, and technology priorities.
- System Improvement: Actively identify improvement opportunities regarding system administration or maintenance tasks.
- Continuous Improvement: Continually identify areas of improvement with respect to product supportability, development process, quality, and technology stack.
- Stakeholder Communication: Effectively communicate with stakeholders to manage expectations and alignments.
- Mentorship: Mentor junior team members, provide technical guidance, and share best practices both within and outside the team.
- Goal Orientation: Focus on achieving team goals and overall project delivery milestones.