Delivery Manager

Job purpose

As the governments housing and regeneration agency we believe that affordable, quality homes in well-designed places are key to improving peoples lives. Together with our partners, were accelerating the pace of house building and regeneration across the country, as we seek to deliver homes and places people are proud to live in for generations to come.

Here in the Digital team, we empower Homes England to deliver its mission through secure, efficient & flexible solutions and digitally empowered colleagues.

Our Delivery Management function supports and leads teams in the delivery and maintenance of high-quality software solutions that enrich the offering of Digital services to the business.

The Delivery Managers role is to nurture a high performing delivery team through motivating and empowering people and promoting collaboration and accountability towards goals. Connecting with stakeholders across the business to make the delivery of software reliable and predictable.

Key relationships

As a manager of our Digital Delivery teams, the Delivery Manager will have frequent interaction with Product Managers, Developers, QA Engineers and Business Analysts. Other teams likely to be involved include Platform & Infrastructure, Digital Support, User Centred Design and Enterprise Architecture.

Wider stakeholders will include partners representing business areas from across Homes England. Regular collaboration with the Delivery Management Community of Practice. The Delivery Manager will also work with 3rd Party Partner teams / suppliers where relevant.

Key accountabilities and responsibilities

• Motivate and empower the team to deliver excellence by ensuring they have the right resources and tools for success, defining goals and measuring progress.
• Championing agile values and helping the team to adopt, grow and mature effective tools and techniques for efficient delivery, promoting an Inspect & Adapt approach.
• Support the team to deliver measurable user and business outcomes.
• Applying appropriate governance to manage quality, risk and compliance and ensure your team/s are effectively embedding Government Service Standards.
• Build relationships with stakeholders through managing expectations, clear and timely reporting and demonstrating understanding of business aims and priorities.
• Contribute to the Delivery Management Community of Practice through sharing ideas, suggesting and implementing Continuous Improvements and contribution to departmental goals.
• Facilitate collaboration and the flow of information between and outside of the immediate Delivery team, stakeholder groups and third-party suppliers and partner resources.
• Able to deal with complexity through creative problem solving and effective management of risks, issues and dependencies.

Key skills, knowledge and experience

• Agile and Lean practices

Holds a recognized agile leadership certification, for example Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

Able to: Identify and compare the best processes or delivery methods to use; Recognise when something doesnt work, encouraging experimentation; Adapt and reflect, be resilient and see outside of the process; Measure and evaluate outcomes; help teams to manage and visualise outcomes.

• Commercial Management

Able to: Act as the point of contact for contracted suppliers; Understand appropriate internal contacts and processes within a government department; Understand how and when third parties should be brought into digital, data and technology projects.

• Communicating between the technical and non-technical

Able to: Listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them; Effectively manage stakeholder expectations; Manage active and reactive communication; Support or host difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.

• Financial Management

Able to: balance cost versus value; Consider the impact of user needs; Report on financial delivery; Monitor cost and budget; Understand how and when to escalate issues.

• Lifecycle perspective

Able to: Recognise when to move from one stage of a product life cycle to another; Ensure the team is working towards the appropriate service standards for the relevant phase; Manage the delivery of products and services at different phases.

• Maintaining Delivery Momentum

Able to: Facilitate the delivery flow of a team, managing the pace and tempo; Actively address internal and external risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team.

• Making a process work

Able to: Identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated; Add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes; Guide teams through the implementation of a new process.

• Planning

Able to: Understand the environment and prioritise the most important or high value tasks; Use data to inform planning; Manage complex internal and external dependencies; Provide delivery confidence; Remove blockers or impediments that affect plans and develop a plan for difficult situations; Ensure teams plan appropriately given capacity.

• Team dynamics and collaboration

Able to: Effectively bring people together to form a motivated team; Help to create the right environment for a team to work in and can empower them to deliver; Recognise and deal with issues; Help create the best team makeup depending on the situation.