Manchester & London, UK.
Please apply for this role at www.madetech.com/careers.
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 agile Delivery Manager to truly own the delivery of large scale programmes and manage key client and internal relationships, aiming to create a healthy delivery roadmap and increase repeat business. Reporting to our Delivery Director, Chris Blackburn, the role will monitor between 1-3 delivery teams – typically comprised of 2 Full-Stack Engineers, 1 Lead Engineer and 1 Senior Engineer – allocating resources as required and balancing customer expectations to ensure that large-scale, complex enterprise projects are delivered effectively. In turn this will free up the current team to focus on backlogs, prioritisation and delivery.
We'll expect you to take a true leadership role throughout the delivery lifecycle, typically managing large scale projects with multiple workstreams, right from the discovery phase. During discovery, which normally takes 1-2 weeks, you will use the customer's high-level business objectives to create the delivery roadmap. You will work with a range of stakeholders, including the Product Owners, client, third-party services and Discovery Team, to identify and remove blockers, whilst empowering the delivery teams to decide on best practice and design epics/user stories to work from.
By ensuring roadmaps are prioritised by business value and risk you will ensure our delivery teams are able to ship a first release within 12 weeks and continue to ship daily from then on. We aim to always delight our customers with the quality of service that can be delivered within their budget.
You will design appropriate reporting metrics and health checks to accurately monitor the progress of a project. That will include accessible weekly and monthly dashboards that can be fed back to the relevant stakeholders, including Directors. These will incorporate budget requirements and outcomes as well as outlining blockers and risks.
As Delivery Manager, 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.
Appropriate communication channels, such as daily stand-ups, Trello/Asana boards and catch-ups, must be setup, maintained and used for each project to avoid or minimise blockers within the delivery team. They also provide greater levels of visibility and transparency over the project for all relevant parties, including the Account Lead.
Through positioning yourself as the main point of contact for the client, you will gain their trust and foster an exceptional working relationship. You are ultimately responsible for the delivery of customer objectives, so you must understand them completely and manage expectations appropriately. You should aim to delight the client at any opportunity, converting them into a long-term advocate of Made Tech.
Finally, you will be responsible for budget maintenance and requirements throughout the delivery lifecycle, ensuring that budgets are being burned effectively using a Time and Materials (T&M) contract approach so that invoicing reflects the time spent on any given project. That will include proactively managing and mitigating risks whilst ensuring that customer expectations are exceeded.
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. The role could develop in a commercially focused direction, or transition towards agile coaching (either internally or externally), or even evolve into a Principal Delivery or Head of Delivery position – we're happy to support you to take charge of your future and follow your passions!
Balancing life and work:
✈️ Flexible Holiday – We trust you to take as much holiday as you need- 🕰️ Flexible Working Hours – We are flexible with what hours you work
- 🗓️ Flexible Working Days – We are flexible to the amount of days you work in a week
- 👶 Flexible Parental Leave – We provide flexible parental leave options
- 👩💻 Remote Working – We offer part-time remote working for all our staff
- 🤗 Paid counselling – We offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice
- 🏖️ Paid anniversary break – We celebrate your 3 and 5 year anniversary with us by buying your family a holiday
Making work as fabulous as possible:
- 💻 Work Ready – We'll buy you a Macbook, ergonomic equipment, books, conferences, training, and more
- 💡 Learn Tech – We spend every Friday afternoon learning rather than working
- 🍽️ Friday Lunches – We randomly match up 8 colleagues every Friday and pay for lunch
- 🍻 Friday Drinks – We pay for social drinks on a Friday
Compensating you fairly:
- 💷 Transparent Salary Bands – We publish salary bands so you know you're being fairly compensated
- 👌 Annual Salary Reviews – We review your salary on an annual basis
- ⛷️ Pension Scheme – We provide a pension scheme so you can save for your future and we'll contribute to it
- 🚄 Season Ticket Loan – We provide loans to help you pay for your travel
- 🚲 Cycle To Work Scheme – We offer the cycle to work scheme to help pay for your bicycle
- 🚕 Expenses Paid – Taxi to a meeting? Want to take a customer to lunch? Expenses are no hassle!
This role has a salary of £50-80k depending on experience.
Please apply for this role at www.madetech.com/careers. If you don't quite fit the role, the role doesn't quite fit you, or you have questions please email us at careers@madetech.com where we will be happy to help.
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.