For example one of the recruiters I use has just passed her CSM so she is now a certified ‘Scrum Master’ having never worked in IT or with agile ever. If you 'Google' Service Delivery Manager jobs there are thousands of jobs on various job boards around the world. It’s not a Scrum Master nor is it an Agile Coach but I feel that it sits alongside the coach role in terms of responsibility. Yeah! RT @ewebber: I have just given the most popular post on my blog “Explaining the role of a Delivery Manager” a refresh https://t.co/lfBA3Mbh…. There tends to be a problem team level coaches/ Scrum Masters fall into when they lack the influence needed for coaching senior management and can’t effect the change needed to gain it. I’m not convinced it’s ideal, but I think it’s better than scrum master (which suggests a particular framework) and agile project manager (that is too close in language to project manager). That venn diagram is so good and it’s so so helpful. I think your articles are clear and concise and again IMHO, there should be commonality of all job roles and expectations…….Do I hear the Angels? In this type of SDM role your hands-on experience and knowledge is critical in supporting both the SLM and BRM roles. They will know which techniques to try out when to make sure the team are getting the best out of being agile. So we end up wading through a ton of CVs and interviewing loads of people in order to check out their agile credentials and mindset. You might look to Toyota and think about “Team Lead”, but as there is not just one leader in the team, I’m not sure it’s right in this context. However, it’s very tricky to manage an agile team properly, in the way Jon suggests, while being subject to ‘date first’ pressures. ADMs in my organisation just add to the bureaucracy of a team and certainly don’t add any value. It’s a valid conversation and I think we are all in the same boat when it comes to hiring. The previous comment regarding Scrum Masters being “junior facilitators” was simply wrong. That is what I believe as well but I’ve only experienced the short term delivery focus way. hourly. I did it only for you to recognise attacking others is not the right way to go but again, with a post so long and the way I wrote the rest I understand the misunderstanding. Some of them even do not feel any embarrasment to call themselves agile coaches when their level is just the “no level/no certification” level or the “really starting” level (and they stopped there as they could cash on that, what would have been the point to improve anyway?). It isn’t the role of an SDM to get your hands dirty fixing infrastructure or software, unless your organisation is so small that you have to multitask. on iTunes. I’ve seen lots of papers saying that the role of SDM needs to be broken up into an SLM and BRM role, but that doesn’t have to be the case especially in smaller organisations where there may not be the budget or head count available. Does that mean she knows more than someone without the certification – of course it doesn’t. Inevitably you end up pushing and demanding and some Agile people resent that. So I appreciate both sides of the discussion. They work closely with the product manager (sometimes known as product owner), but while the product manager is concerned with the vision the delivery manager is concerned with making it happen. Sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram are very important skills that span all parts of the delivery manager role like coaching (individuals, the team and people outside of the team), diplomacy, leadership (including servant leadership), communication and facilitation. I’ve explained my position on using a framework in a job title, I’m not going to repeat it. The team are responsible for delivery and the Scrum master is responsible for removing impediments. However, you can take steps to be a good service delivery manager from the start. Alternatively you may be a SDM with just one or more internal customers within the business of your own organisation. Service provisioning is a team challenge and you need to understand the service provider’s internal organisational support capabilities (documented in Operational Level Agreements (OLAs)), and balance them against the businesses’ service level requirements. Terminology that is used in one place may be frowned upon in others, e.g Delivery Manager is acceptable in governmental place but maybe seen as too bureaucratic in start ups. But first, a research team tried to prove the opposite: that managers actually don’t matter, that the quality of a manager didn’t impact a team’s performance. It’s fine, this is irrelevant really, I think this is the same that when I added some of my certifications as a way to invite you to discuss if you wanted it – somehow to demonstrate I had reasons to support what I was saying – but you felt at your side that I did it because I’m fond of them. I have come across this blog article while preparing for an interview for “delivery lead manager” role. It is quite inspirational to learn of the multiple views of different people and validates the blog and the comments. I know that Barclays (Knutsford) view CSP as an entry gate for some of their senior Agile roles, right or wrongly. That aside, carrying on from my comments on naming, Jon what were your thoughts on possibilities? How do you maintain Customer satisfaction at the same time you’re failing you SLA targets. The problem we sometimes come across is that of Product Owners and Delivery Managers do not have a clear understanding of their role, and as mentioned education, and experience are paramount. Had a good long conversation with a friend/colleague recently on this very topic and In the future, I can see the Scrum Master title/job description (based largely off the 2.5 day CSM credential) being differentiated from a “Delivery Lead /Manager” – a highly capable and multi skilled delivery specialist with a deep mastery and understanding of all things agile. It is a difficult task to ensure that you are not just ‘sitting on the fence’ or even ‘piggy in the middle’. 1-2 years experience . An agile delivery type person (insert better name here) should be about building long term capability, through nurturing self organisation, increasing transparency and trust, helping navigate disfunction and conflict, and motivation through autonomy, mastery and purpose. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. As you mention, in a large organisation education is important, change is hard and it’s particularly hard for people outside an agile team to understand the change in ways of working if no one helps them see what it means, how it affects them and how they can benefit from it. These are often outward facing tasks and may include things like financial tracking, hiring, stakeholder relationships (supporting the product owner), reporting to a wider organisation (particularly relevant if the organisation has not fully adopted agile yet) and anything else that no one else is doing, but is necessary to support the team’s delivering value. If customer complaints can be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both parties then it is possible to turn a sticky situation around. That said, if others aren’t ‘playing the game’ or there are gaps in the organisational structure, then that needs to be flagged up to management. 9) Firefighting is for firemen, not SDMs. And one final point of misunderstanding from you. If you feel that you need an ADM for an agile team to deliver then you are doing agile wrong, have no trust or have the wrong skill set in the team. Showing one the true skills of a Delivery Manager that you can’t learn on one of Santiago’s many courses (evident in is post!)…. CSM is pointless but the CSP and higher are hard to achieve and take 12months+ of effort. An AWESOME delivery manager does all that and make sure that least damage in terms of motivation and morale is done to the key people - who more often than not are the ones that need to be "burnt" to deliver on time, budget, quality and cost. If you are embedded within your customers organisation, it may be perceived that on occasion you may be seen as ‘going native’, especially if you vociferously protect or support your customer against your colleagues in the service provider. 10) Where the role of the SLM and BRM are clearly and unambiguously defined and the positions currently exist and are filled, then the role of the SDM will sit between them and will tend to be one of ‘day-to-day’ contact for supply and support challenges even operating in an operational/tactical space between the Service Desk and the SLM. This is true of any role. In my experience (have worked several years for a number of Government departments in the UK) I would say that an Agile Delivery Manager or better a Delivery Lead title role is more appropriate than a Scrum Master. Basically you are key to driving operational effectiveness. These people would reject great candidates because they don’t have a piece of paper. Hate is not that direction IMHO. Here are the duties and responsibilities that a Delivery/Program Manager is likely to perform in their role. I think this is a great article that contains a lot of useful nuggets when trying to understand the Delivery Manager role. I blame LinkedIn …seriously. This person would naturally posses the training and capacity to also fulfil the Scrum Master role, and facilitate Scrum ceremonies, stand ups etc, as required. | Parliamentary Digital Service, Product Roadmaps in Five Easy Pieces | YouRead, Quick icebreakers for online meetings, (that don't suck), Explaining the role of a Delivery Manager, Daily Outside Photo: Adding a bit of humanness to your Slack group, Networks, Serendipity and the flow of ideas, My good looking video conferencing set up, Building Successful Communities of Practice, The team manual, an exercise to help build empathy in teams, Social group sizes, Dunbar's number and implications for communities of practice. I can’t help but think you should look a bit deeper into your approach to other agile practices. A Service Delivery Manager in the New York City, NY Area area reported making $110,000 per year. To quote you “There is no reason to feel menace by other agile practitioners, independently on their approach to work, we should be all together.” – maybe you should take your own advice there. One thing I did not mention was that I found your article to be very good and that was the reason for deciding to read the comments below it, …then the misunderstanding happened in my side, I f* up and never said anything about the quality of your work. In this position, you will be responsible to ensure the speed, cost, and quality of the delivery of our products to our customers all across Europe. No related titles found. Learn how your comment data is processed. Two things that I would recommend to help you on your journey in your new role: But teams can only complete sprint tasks timeously when they are unhindered. They need to be pragmatic and have excellent relationship management skills. Now that it’s public please make my apology also public if you don’t mind. Nowadays its done via people thinking of the most ‘trending’ job titles on LinkedIn. I’m approving your long and misleading comment so that I can respond to your points as publicly as you intended them to be. That’s a topic for another blog post – or rant in the pub. Not just moral support but real technical support. If you disagree or wish to add to our article then please let us know your thoughts. I too have experienced recruiters that don’t get the role. A great manager expands the limit of what their “best” means. A blog about agile, lean, people and things. – Progress is measured using these set metrics Maybe “Agile Delivery Lead” may be slightly better. Short term delivery focus can lead to MVPs that forgot the V and crippling technical debt. A Tool for tracking Kanban projects (that you can cut out and keep), Pattern and Yarn (knitting hats for charity). This is rude towards the many very good and very agile delivery managers that I know. Project delivery; Budgeting; Reviews, reporting, and evaluations; Process management, then, is a way to catalog all of these processes, get a birds-eye-view of it all, and circulate knowledge about each item as needed. Hi Emily, It was totally my fault as I misinterpreted what I read but that doesn’t excuse the fact that even with that I did not do my best to make sure that I write a non-attacking comment, even more when I was criticising what I believed to be an attack to Scrum Masters in general. Your mention about the £1K one needs to spend before becoming a Scrum Master tells me you don’t know about Scrum.org and that you took or looked into a first level Scrum Alliance course at a certain point in the past; this is also inline with the fact that you seem to believe that only experience counts for a “Delivery manager”, that new “agile” term that the government has put in vogue but doesn’t really mean anything in any agile movement out there. She is referring not to what she or I think a scrum master is, but her experience of dealing with the recruitment industry. So as well as ensuring that we have SLAs in place documenting service level requirements we should ensure that all the OLAs are in place to monitor and report on internal support capabilities and service delivery. ‘Delivery Managers are not Project Managers’ should be a very clear message to all, backed with some education on why not and some ideas as to how boards and committees could be more helpful in treating DMs in ways more likely to engender the right behaviours with their teams. The Diversity Charter How many pizzas does it really take to feed your team? I hope this idea sinks in your brain and helps you to stop supporting prejudices and rejection that other people do based on their limited knowledge, you should have point them into the right direction instead. I’ve detoured slightly away from your original topic, apologies. 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Scrum is part of Lean. The team starts as a group of strangers and needs to be made into a core group of people. The way in which a Delivery Manager is “used” can vary, I have worked in Projects for a number of years, and IMHO the title is now being used incorrectly as was Business Analysts. Monitor and manage vendor performances to ensure contractual SLA's are met. I’ve been in places where this means working with clients, places where it means reporting outwards and places where it means making sure contracts are in place and people have passes to get into the building. Hackney A nice and relevant post from Yiannis Godfrey who is at the Australian government digital service went up today: https://www.dto.gov.au/blog/so-what-does-a-delivery-manager-do/. Job Highlights. Let’s cover the previous comments that you bring up: You have accused me of not defending scrum to a point that Victoria made. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka isolated Lean’s core in January 1986 (read The New New Product Development Game research paper for more info on this). the delivery support part of the role does depend on the organisation. As previously discussed this will depend on your organisation, its strategic goals and structure and your place within it and your customer base. “Focused, curious listening conveys an emotional and personal investment in those who work for us,” according to Muse contributor Kristi Hedges. Most good office managers have a naturally positive attitude and warm demeanor. Jamie Arnold may have written about the organisation that he works for looking for staff. It also strongly hints that it’s about Scrum, rather than any broader Agile or Lean principles which may not involve Scrum at all. The delivery manager may challenge existing processes and work with people outside the team to update them if they are slowing the team down or not adding the most value for everyone. Thanks for your comment, there are some great clarification points in here. Although I am also interested in how those that employ these roles also help build experience in the market for the benefit of everyone (one of the reasons I run Agile meetups and am such a fan of communities of practice). There is some good stuff in there. As you point to, quality is an important aspect of any delivery, facilitating the team to be great should include the appropriate levels of quality for what is being built and for what purpose. Good project managers stay on track. I have been experiencing difficulty in the current job market because I do no have the word scrum or agile all over my CV, it would appear and i do not see why I should need to. Hi Kate, Personally, I prefer the Spotify approach of team Agile Coach, which i think aligns better with principles/values and sets a better expectation. The last thing I would want to do is insist that someone forks out ~£1000 before they can even apply for a job. Now who funds the service improvements will depend on what is in place between you and your customer, a legal contract or an internal company agreement. They will encourage and motivate the team and protect them from external distractions and … The job market has changed where CV are parsed and specific words are searched thus some qualified and expereinced people are looked over because their CV may not appear near the top of the search. Now tell me, what benefit provides me doing the above? I welcome your comments or feedback . 5) Rather than use the Service Level Agreements as a stick to beat up the customers or for them beat us up with, they should be used as an open, honest and transparent driver and an interface between service provider and the customer/business. The role of a SDM is primarily split into that of a ‘tactical’ Service Level Manager (SLM) and a ‘strategic’ Business Relationship Manager (BRM). As there is no formal role for a traditional project manager in an agile team, there are some activities that fall to the delivery manager. If you have a supplier management function you will need to forge a good relationship which involves understanding their goals and challenges. I am an experienced Senior project manager and BA and have delivered numerous projects in different industries. Well, after seeing how hate spreads in your “agile” culture I think I’m off this time. In no particular order are…. 6) We’ve all experienced a ‘high maintenance’ or ‘whinging’ customer and done our best to avoid them. If you are making a service delivery manager resume, you can quickly make the job experience part of it with the sample job description for the role presented above. Show me where in the Scrum guide where it refers to a deliver manager. Google set out to determine what makes a manager great at Google. I’d be interested in hearing thoughts from anyone that works in this area in the comments below. I thought it was evident when I said we could discuss it but I also understand you could decide to discuss it in public. As long as value is being delivered to the business and the process is working, then that is what is important. Its interesting to see how agile is evolving as more and more companies of different sizes are changing the way they deliver. He says: A delivery manager guards the team’s time, to ensure continuous delivery is possible. A scrum master or product owner are not managers in my opinion. Great article Emily! The main responsibilities of this role are: I’m a newly promoted Agile Delivery Lead with no training. What was the need to diminish Scrum Masters? Developers and other team members are capable professionals in their own discipline, self-organizing and cross-functional. The SLM part of your role is about ensuring that agreed Service Level Targets are met on an on-going basis and reported on though service level reports and service review meetings. However, when hiring, it seems that out in the recruitment space “Scrum Master” has come to equate “junior facilitator” and so finding highly experienced Scrum Masters is actually very hard. We can have overlapping roles of Team Coach and Enterprise Coach, which makes the different emphasis of the roles clear, but doesn’t stop people at the team level also coaching in the wider organisation and visa versa. Successful delivery is based on project management fundamentals that we learned in school or on the job. Casualties of Christmas, The term delivery manager is used to describe an essential set of skills on an agile team and is, , helping the team to self organise and creating a culture of learning and transparency. The Delivery manager is one who give insight and in some cases foresight into the “blockers” which may or will present themselves, and can oil the wheels before they get stuck. In the case of a major incident the role of the SDM is to communicate with your customer, keeping them appraised of progress and managing their expectations. All these aspects are important and some are easier to learn than others. Company - Public. It’s worth noting that it is important that these two roles are not performed by the same person. Your email address will not be published. The national average salary for a IT Delivery Manager is $58,328 in United States. They will. Communities of practice research Great effort in such a short space of time. They will encourage and motivate the team and protect them from external distractions and politics so they are able to focus on what they are best at. Like them or not, Job titles do help people search for jobs. You can also list a couple of duties from the job description (read it carefully on their job advertisement), and say that you believe to have a capacity to handle them, and that you would enjoy doing them on a daily basis. Again, I honestly apologise. A solid SDM needs good interpersonal skills and be able to read and analyze a situation against the bigger picture. – @daftagiledan, Are you ready for user research? A delivery manager is accountable for the performance of the team. I was the head of role for delivery managers at Government Digital Service (GDS) and since becoming an Agile consultant, I have helped other government departments and organisations hire and develop delivery managers. Where the SLM and BRM roles don’t actually exist in your organisation, then I’m sorry to say but you’re responsible for one or other or both. I have seen this aspect of the role supported by another person (either inside or outside of the team) where the overhead is taking the delivery manager away from Agile & lean practices and Team health & happiness. In recent years, project management has become a fashionable business concept. An enterprise coach can become an enabler for that. A delivery manager should be encouraging that questioning as well as coaching others outside the team so everyone can work together. But I do this knowing that I’m alienating some of my peers who haven’t gone down the certification route. Service delivery managers may be in charge of couriers. I really enjoyed reading your article on the role of a Delivery Manager and it’s comparison to other similiar roles. Different teams will have different needs from their delivery manager, depending on the make-up of the team and the organisation that the team is within. I don’t think a £1k two-day course is the way to prove capability and I’ve seen job ads that require it. I did not pretend this to be public curiously but it’s also my fault not to have stated it in the message. The SLA discussions (service review meetings) should allow us the opportunity to ensure we can develop a real and long lasting ‘win-win’ opportunity. At the end of the day role title isnt important. The delivery manager is the person on the team who leads on agile and lean practices. I’m not 100% certain what you really mean by sharing a photo with Jeff Sutherland but I assume you’re trying to make the point you appreciate Scrum or that Jeff was your monitor. Good Article and a very interesting topic. They do this by creating the right environment for the team to succeed, helping the team to self organise and creating a culture of learning and transparency. I honestly apologise, when I read it yesterday I understood you were supporting the fact that Scrum Masters found lately are “junior facilitators”. Well, same here. Tacit (agile consultancy) The reason for this is because the management frameworks like Scrum (and Kanban which is another popular framework) do not inform the Delivery aspects (“the How”) of an Agile project’s execution. However….. depending on your organisation and method of applying Agile this can and will present its own hybrids, these are not really transferable unless you remain in the same organisation, and unfortunately the expectations of both roles can be somewhat frustrating when changing employers and even in some cases departments within the same organisation. I’d rather look at experience. They aren’t all “guys”. Hi Michael, it sounds like you have had some challenges with how the term delivery manager is used in your organisation. Although I think the naming is interesting and important (you can see my musings on it in the comment above http://emilywebber.co.uk/what-is-an-agile-delivery-manager/#comment-47982), no name will completely fix misunderstandings and how the role is perceived. 10/15 years ago we didn’t really have this plethora of job titles, so peacocking was done in the good old fashioned way of what watch you were sporting and what you had sitting in the car park. The description on the GDS service design manual is a good place to start and over the last few years, I have refined my thinking and the way I describe the role to others. But most importantly it’s about being agile with it. The BRM part of your role is to ensure that customer satisfaction levels are maintained and improved, and it’s vitally important to develop a clear understanding of your business partner’s IT strategy and their overall corporate strategy. All these aspects are important and some are easier to learn than others. It has given me confidence that despite not possessing the qualifications this is not an absolute requirement over experience.