What Does a Delivery Manager Do and Do I Even Need One?

What Does a Delivery Manager Do and Do I Even Need One? A Delivery Manager is a client-facing, Agile https://web.archive.org/web/20210614180159/http://www.founderandlightning.com/resources/glossary?char=a&termId=45770112650 project manager who acts as a servant-leader to ensure high-quality products are delivered in a predictable way. As the main point of contact between founders and Developers, the Delivery Manager keeps everyone connected and informed. They own the plan, align the product strategy and scope with founders and the team, and work closely with founders on priorities as well as future requirements and team changes. Delivery Managers lead all Agile ceremonies (such as meetings and workshops) and ensure teams can be productive and organized by unblocking issues, planning sprints, organising the backlog, driving efficiency, ensuring tasks are ready to be worked on and keeping the team motivated and empowered. Does someone actually believe this?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  A long time subscriber sent me an email and asked me a simple question and asked me if I would record a podcast episode about it. So here we are. They asked me, quote, "What on earth is an agile delivery manager and what do they do?" I got good news. I'm going to answer that question. So what does a delivery manager do? Who are they? A delivery manager is a client-facing agile project manager who acts as a servant leader to ensure high-quality products are delivered in a predictable way. Yes, I wrote that down. It's the main point of contact between the founders and the developers. The delivery manager keeps everyone connected and informed. They own the

• 0:57Speaker 00

  plan, align the product strategy and scope with founders and the team, and work closely with founders on priorities as well as future requirements and team changes. Does this sound familiar? A delivery manager could very well be a functional analyst. Delivery managers lead all agile ceremonies. Now, this is where it gets interesting, such as meetings and workshops. I don't know that any one person should do that, and ensures teams can be productive and self-organized by unblocking issues, planning sprints, organizing a sprint backlog, driving efficiency, ensuring tasks are ready. Okay, I'm gonna pause for a second. And teams feel motivated in a part. Okay, stop. The article that I'm reading, in case you're wondering, it's a wildly

• 1:42Speaker 00

  popular article by a lady named Cynthia. I'm gonna leave it at that. And what I can tell you is, I think there's some confusion here, because it sounds like there's a combination of roles between a functional analyst, a release train engineer, and a scrum master. And you're trying to blend all those together into one role and call it an agile delivery manager. What I can tell you is that the hybridization of those roles altogether would mean that you're trying to get someone to do about 300% of capacity, and that their capability to be able to do the job well is going to fall by the wayside. There's no way somebody's gonna be able to do all of those things, just saying. And it's not that.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I don't have faith in their ability. It's just the bandwidth that it takes to mentally and strategically be aware and ready to do all those things. Just it's not gonna happen. I'm just gonna say like that's not gonna happen. If you start outlining duties and responsibilities as a person, which is what they did. Uh, they, this is the description they use. So listen carefully. They're specialists in planning and delivering various digital products, anything from an initial MVP to uh digesting and existing uh oh, to digitizing. I was like, that was bad. The digitizing and existing whole business. Delivery managers responsibilities include being the main point of contact between founders and a team,

• 3:06Speaker 00

  defining, documenting, recording requirements, scope, priorities, change management, nestimations, running key ceremonies, standups, sprints, sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, retros, creating and presenting easy to follow reporting, including throughput, risks, issues and successes. Keeping projects on time and on budget, encouraging regular iteration of deliverables, creating a collaborative, innovative and efficient working culture and team performance. They should be able to help you find buried treasure, help you find true love, walk on water. I need the last three up, but I think you get where I'm going with this. This unicorn that you're trying to produce is is not the one. I mean, yes, I get what a delivery manager is supposed to do on paper, but I've never successfully seen anyone.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  The closest thing I've seen is a release training engineer, and this is not a release training engineer. So the point they're trying to make is that everyone needs this role because people aren't doing their jobs effectively. And I get what they're trying to say. The second thing they're trying to say is without this person in place, developers have to act as their own unofficial scrum masters, which isn't necessarily true. I think though that we're confusing roles, responsibilities and accountabilities.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  If it came down to it, I would say, forget about the titles for a minute. Let's just call them gummy bear one, gummy bear two, gummy bear three. That way, there's no, no rights, rules, regulations associated with any of those titles. Yes. I think if we get into accountabilities and responsibilities, many people want to find someone or hire someone with those responsibilities. They'll list it as a job wreck and try to hire someone that can do all these things. But what they'll quickly find is from an accountability perspective, that these people aren't able to do all those things. And it's just the way it's worked out. It's not anything that you've done wrong. It's just that organizationally, no one person can get their head around all of those different things. It would be the same as trying to say that you have an omnipotent product owner that

• 5:04Speaker 00

  understands all the wants, needs, whims and desires of customer to understand everything about strategic direction we're trying to go. And they know everything about the stakeholders, the key stakeholders, the interested parties. They're also technologically feasible, understand all the technology, infrastructure, architecture, everything behind what we're trying to build. It's just trying to find one person to do all those things is a silly upscale. What I'm saying instead is instead of trying to focus all of your attention on having an agile delivery manager, why not break that out and have an agile project manager who replaces a scrum master, a product manager replaces a product owner, and a delivery team that understands their main accountability is not just to churn code, but to make sure

• 5:47Speaker 00

  they're building solutions into the process to help people find better features and features and products even, products and services that they, that they like better. Because the features that are built into them are actually what the end consumer is looking for, and they actually solve the problem. And the most important part of all, they actually provide value. There you have it. So value driven delivery is probably the answer more so than this. So Cynthia, while I love you dearly, I just don't know that this is the right answer. That's going to do it for today. I hope you enjoyed my review of this article. If you have a topic you want me to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. I'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye.