What is a Delivery Lead?
What does “Delivery Lead” mean?
The job title Delivery Lead started appearing around 2015, and began to become popular in tech companies such as SEEK and REA Group. The role has proliferated since then across many Australian companies, despite the fact there is no formal definition of a Delivery Lead. It’s popularity demonstrates that there is a role to be played that is satisfied by this capability. Let’s explore what a Delivery Lead does and what they are responsible for.
The word Lead in the title helps us to understand that this person fills a leadership role. Use of the word Lead instead of Manager indicates that the person most likely isn’t responsible for directly managing a team, or a budget. The concept of a Servant Leader is popularised in Agile, where a person might lead a group or a team, and work in a supportive function to enable them to be able to do their job successfully. A Delivery Lead satisfies the definition of Servant Leader - their job is to set the focus, or direction, of the team, and enable them to achieve the desired outcomes. This is a really important point - The Delivery Lead is not a single point of delivery accountability, otherwise they just become the Project Manager. Their job is to help the delivery team as a whole to own accountability for delivery. They help the team to become more delivery focussed.
Delivery is a capability intended to help teams meet with expected outcomes that stakeholders set, usually over a longer-term period. Agile frameworks like Scrum do not consider the needs of completing longer-term delivery plans. A lot of companies maintain their focus on long-term planning, and wish to track progress against their plans to be able to make decisions and set direction.
We can begin to understand that this role is for helping teams to set and achieve longer-term plans, using estimation, work breakdown and risk management to compliment iterative software development practices.
Current Delivery Lead jobs: https://www.seek.com.au/delivery-lead-jobs
When is there a need for Delivery Leads?
Delivery Leads are valuable to have when the portfolio of work is largely made up of discrete projects, or an organisation manages a host of internal applications that need to be developed. Also when it is difficult to define a specific product, or set of products, that the company sells, or when Product Management is not strongly represented in the organisation.
Product Management and Product Development creates a relatively straight-forward focus on delivering to a clearly agreed outcome, whereas in its absence, the priority and drive towards outcomes can be lacking. When clear direction and outcomes are lacking, teams can find themselves floundering for direction, and constantly changing priorities based upon demands coming from outside the team.
So where does the Delivery Lead role fit in with Scrum teams then?
In 2016 I brought the Delivery Lead role into UniSuper, and it was a combination of a Business Analyst and Scrum Master. At the time we didn’t have dedicated Product Owners for the Scrum teams, and the Business Analysts were core to defining the needs of users and customers. The Business Analysts were given Scrum Master training, and became responsible for improving the Scrum team’s capability.
We gave them the title Delivery Lead to recognise that they were required to be able to set and achieve delivery plans with their teams. Given that Scrum Master training doesn’t provide this education, we formed a Delivery Lead practice, and shared our knowledge and learnings. We wanted to build the most cutting edge knowledge and were able to perform a site visit to both REA Group and SEEK in Melbourne, where we could observe how other Delivery Leads worked with their teams. We brought our learnings back to UniSuper and made it the basis of our practice.
Eventually, Product Owners were brought into the Scrum teams, and the business analysis efforts were focussed on the more nuanced details of requirements, often when trying to interpret regulatory requirements.
In 2019 I brought the Delivery Lead role to ERM Power. At the time, the IT group were struggling to deliver projects which were being measured against time and cost constraints. My goal was to successfully transform the business and IT group to Agile ways of working, and I knew that I had to successfully deliver the many projects in the portfolio to gain the trust and confidence of the business stakeholders and senior management. Moving to Agile is a transformational process that takes many steps and requires a lot of change management. Building the delivery capability of the IT unit was my core focus before attempting the transformation. This is important for Agile to be seen as successful in the eyes of our stakeholders and management.
At ERM Power (which later became Shell Energy), the role of Delivery Lead predominantly focuses on delivery. The Business Analysts were a separate role, and had a pure focus on requirements definition. Product Ownership was scarce and not very well understood, but this would change over the coming years. ERM Power had a large number of projects to be completed, and insufficient Scrum teams to be able to complete the work. The approach we took was to work with the teams to be able to massively parallelise the work within each Scrum team. It required a very hands-on approach to breaking down the portfolio of work, and managing the loads of the Scrum teams.
Over the course of the Agile transformation, the Delivery Leads took increasing ownership of the breakdown, planning and delivery of the work in each respective Scrum team. We could share one Delivery Lead across 2 teams successfully, and we could have up to 4 different project streams being worked on by a single Scrum team at one time. This was possible only by breaking down large projects into smaller features that could easily be taken on by the teams.
The Delivery Leads at Shell Energy are excellent at estimation, planning and delivery of the large demand coming from the business, as evidenced by performance data.
The importance of having Delivery Leads
Delivery Leads agree delivery expectations with their stakeholders and manage those expectations within the software teams they lead. They set expectations by going through a process of work breakdown, estimation and planning together with their teams. They manage expectations with their teams by tracking and reporting progress against those plans, and are empowered to help the team make decisions to meet those plans. They work with stakeholders to inform their decisions, and enable their stakeholders to stand at arm’s length and be confident that delivery schedules will be met.
It is important for Scrum teams to continue delivering while undertaking a digital transformation or Agile transformation, and to build the trust of management. Teams can be given greater autonomy and empowerment when they are seen to be meeting delivery expectations. Teams build trust by increasing transparency of progress against their plan, and showing how they are making rational decisions to achieve the plan.
Through transparency and empowerment, teams are able to become autonomous and achieve outcomes with less direction from management and stakeholders. This frees up managers and stakeholders to focus on strategy and their own operations.
I improve the performance of delivery teams.
