The job title of the Delivery Manager has become more and more prevalent over the past years. Delivery Managers oversee the development and execution of new technology products and services. They are responsible for working with product management and engineering teams to ensure these efforts are successfully executed.
In many companies today, the responsibilities of the Delivery Manager tend to be part of other job titles. Team members who do this job (whether they specifically acknowledge it or not) include the ScrumMaster, Project Manager, Product Manager, Technical Lead, or Program Manager. There’s no problem with this, as long as the responsibilities are clear and the work is done well.
Delivery Managers’ responsibilities tend to include the following:
- Directly oversees the work processes and tasks being performed by the teams
- Enables visibility of project progress and maintains strong communication with appropriate stakeholders
- Ensures the team is operating efficiently, working smoothly, resolving bottlenecks and ensuring best practices are followed
- Works collaboratively to define and improve policies, definitions of done, and way the team works
- Responsible for ensuring work is completed accurately and on time
- Encourages and motivates the team as an expert facilitator
- Creates and enables an environment for continuous improvement
- Ensures the right work gets pulled into progress based on business prioritization
- Coordinates team management duties including planning, time tracking, scheduling of tasks, estimation, etc
A competent and strong Delivery Manager focuses on managing flow to keep their team working efficiently and unblocked. This is the difference between being proactive versus being reactive.
As companies continue to adopt agile practices beyond Scrum, including lean, kanban, XP, and devops principles, they will steadily move in the direction of becoming ‘service delivery organizations’, becoming ever more fit for purpose and aligning their operations and engineering organizations directly in line with the needs of the business.