Agile Delivery Lead

I have a role at an ambitious Financial Sector client. The role is a Delivery Manager (Scrum Master) working with several teams in an Integrations Workstream for a Building Society. The specific experience I am looking for is someone with Azure API / File Transfer / Microservices build work. Whilst you will not be expected to be the Technical SME in this area, a sound knowledge will help the role be successful.

The Delivery Lead of an agile delivery team is able to navigate a variety of projects and coach the team through challenges using a variety of agile tools and techniques. They will have a strong focus on successful outcomes and have a highly collaborative nature in order to bring people together to form shared understanding of the desired outcome and communicate vision. The Delivery Lead needs to be resilient and flexible in order to step into a variety of situations and take ownership in order to steer the team towards success. The Delivery Lead needs to understand the agile and cloud strategy in order to embed agile ways of working and build the vision into the delivery team’s ambitions.

• Ensure that the vision and goals for the agile delivery team are well communicated and understood by its members.
• Work with the team’s Product Owner, PM, BA and Stakeholders to ensure that collaborative agile working takes place.
• Have a strong focus on delivering project/products and services that meet user needs.
• Help function leads with the recruitment for any replacements or additional team members to ensure that the agile delivery team is appropriately resourced.
• Ensure that any task management and documentation tooling is set up correctly for the team and is well maintained and meeting the team’s needs.
• Minimise waste from hand-overs by ensuring that the BA facilitates the team into attending requirements workshops and collaborates with the team in analysis sessions to avoid simply handing over requirements and creating ambiguity.
• Understand the unique dynamics of the team and help members to understand and agree on their roles and responsibilities.

• Ensure that the agile delivery team is cross-functional, empowered and self-organising.
• Ensure that the agile delivery team is following the agile delivery approach and agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) methods (Scrum and Kanban), so this becomes the standard approach for software projects/software product and service development in the business.
• Ensure that if the team is closely aligned within a delivery unit that the teams are effectively collaborating.
• Ensure that all the agile delivery team regularly (at least fortnightly) holds/partakes in show and tell sessions with the other delivery teams in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and implement common practices.

• Have a keen understanding of the end-to-end software release process including the delivery pipelines to help optimise regular releases and delivery of working software.
• Hold an understanding of safety regarding best practices in terms of data privacy and information security standards around test data.
• Ensure that the developers and testers tooling and frameworks are being followed correctly in order to assure quality.

• Ensure that team members are attending the daily stand-ups and that the emphasis of the stand-ups is focussed on the Kanban board and the efficient flow of tasks through the board, starting from right to left.
• Ensure that wider project team members and relevant stakeholders are aware of the time of the daily stand-ups and understand the stand-up etiquette.
• Ensure that regular planning is taking place (fortnightly as a minimum, more frequently is desired, daily goals where necessary to drive delivery).
• Ensure that handoffs are reduced by facilitating full team collaboration in analysis, test analysis and planning.
• Ensure that testing is ‘shifted left’ through the use of the Kanban board and the effective breakdown of tasks into the smallest, testable, vertical slices.
• Ensure that the members of the agile delivery team are attending their function’s Community of Practice to help facilitate the wider knowledge sharing of activities and developments that are taking place within the agile team.
• Ensure that acceptance and test criteria is being fleshed out collaboratively and documented.
• Work with the team to define sprint (iteration) goals, definition of done and Kanban gateway rules.
• Ensure that regular end of sprint (iteration) demos/reviews are held for stakeholders.
• Ensure that team retrospectives take place and the team prioritise frequent retrospectives in their quest for continuous improvement.

• Ensure that the team strive towards always delivering iteratively and incrementally, to avoid mini-waterfall and big-bang.
• Ensure effective agile discovery, inception and MVP phases are undertaken.
• Ensure that post-MVP the same iterative and incremental approach is still being taken to improvements/feature development within a live service.
• Ensure that any areas of risk are tackled early by front loading into inception.
• Ensure that non-functional requirements are handled upfront by surfacing and agreeing during inception and baked into the delivery roadmap and epics.

The team is using SCRUM to develop the connectivity within a cloud hybrid model that is key to a business transformation programme. The Delivery Lead works with a PM who is looking after the higher-level transformation programme, this role is Leading Delivery in fortnightly sprints. It pays £650/day inside and will run for approx 12 months. Please only apply if this is something that you could hit the ground running with, we will only be considering candidates with strong experience in very similar roles.