Guidance

Head of (agile) delivery management: skills they need

Updated 2 January 2019

This content is part of the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Capability Framework which describes the DDaT roles in government and the skills needed to do them.

1. What a head of (agile) delivery management does

The head of delivery management is an experienced practitioner who exemplifies what good looks like across the delivery roles.

As a head of delivery management you will:

• represent and champion the role within their department, across government and in industry
• lead the community of practice for this role and build capability and excellence (in an agile, lean practice)
• be responsible for the recruitment of the right people to the right teams.
• support professional development and continuous improvement of their community.
• work with other heads of roles to promote effective cross-functional delivery
• be a skilled team leader who is able to confidently communicate the value of the role to digital and non-digital stakeholders
• be credible and influential across departments

2. What skills they need

A head of delivery management needs specific technical skills.

All roles have essential skills, and some have desirable skills.

Each skill has one of 4 skill levels associated with it:

• Expert
• Practitioner
• Working
• Awareness

2.1 Essential skills

Skill	Description of the skill	Skill level	What the skill level means
Agile and Lean practices	Has a deep knowledge of and leads on a range of Agile and Lean tools and techniques, with an ability to coach within and outside of their team. Able to represent and be an advocate for these tools and techniques, be innovative and ensure they keep up to date with the latest trends. Able to establish the feedback loop for teams and has responsibility for the translation and measurement of value (what you put in and what you will get out) and how this relates to practical government objectives and the user needs. Able to ensure the team has a situational awareness of what each other is working on. Ensures that working practices are iterated to achieve effective delivery.	Expert	Coaches and leads teams in Agile and Lean practices. Is a recognised expert that advocates these approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team. Creates or tailors new ways of working and is always innovating.
Communicating between the technical and non-technical	Able to communicate effectively across organisational, technical and political boundaries, understanding the context. Able to advocate and communicate what a team does to create trust and authenticity. Can successfully react and respond to challenge.	Expert	Able to mediate and mend relationships, communicating with stakeholders at all levels. Able to manage stakeholders’ expectations and facilitate discussions across high risk and complexity or under constrained timescales. Able to speak and represent the community to large audiences inside and outside of government.
Maintaining delivery momentum	Able to solve issues and unblock problems. Drives teams and sets the pace, ensuring teams are working towards delivery commitments. Able to engage in elements of risk management such as effectively managing and tracking the mitigation of risks. Able to manage various dependencies across teams, departments and government as a whole.	Expert	Able to optimise the delivery flow of teams. Able to actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists. Able to identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
Making the process work	Focuses on the outcome. Able to challenge and improve disproportionate organisational processes where it impacts the pace of the team. Able to identify what works best for the team and when to utilise certain processes. Understands that all steps in a process must add value. Able to influence and make positive changes to the organisation.	Expert	Able to identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated. Able to add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes. Guides teams through the implementation of a new process.
Planning	Able to take a continuous approach to planning, forecasting, estimating, managing uncertainty, metrics and measurements, contingency planning and roadmapping. Able to communicate the plan, planning assumptions and progress to a range of stakeholders. Maintains the cadence of delivery and manages the relationships between different people within and across teams.	Expert	Able to lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment. Able to plan beyond product delivery. Able to identify dependencies in plans across services and coordinate delivery. Coaches other teams as the central point of expertise.
Team dynamics and collaboration	Able to build successful delivery teams and understand team styles and how people work together. Able to maintain, influence and motivate a team. Able to give and receive feedback, facilitating the feedback loop. Ensures the health of the team and can facilitate conflict resolution, accelerating team performance. Able to ensure the team is transparent and that the work is understood externally. Able to create an open and collaborative environment to work in, be flexible, adaptable and have a willingness to learn. Able to recognise how people best work together, facilitating the best team makeup depending on the situation. Able to help teams maintain a focus on delivery whilst being aware of the importance of professional development.	Expert	Changes organisational structures to fixable, sustainable, good designs. Leads on the strategy for the whole organisation, joining up business needs with innovative analysis. Able to make and justify decisions characterised by high levels of risk, impact and complexity. Builds consensus between organisations (private or public) or highly independent and diverse stakeholders. Solves and unblocks issues between teams or departments at the highest level. Understands the psychology of the team and has strong mediation skills. Able to coach the organisation on team dynamics and conflict resolution.

2.2 Desirable skills

Skill	Description of the skill	Skill level	What the skill level means
Commercial management	Able to support effective budget management within the constraints of the project. Retains a continued awareness of the budget against actual cost incurred.	Expert	Able to act as the escalation point and resolve large or high risk commercial management issues. Able to coach others in appropriate commercial management.
Financial management	Able to support effective budget management within the constraints of the project. Retains a continued awareness of the budget against actual cost incurred.	Practitioner	Understands the market place, realising the benefit and persuading others that a product is the right one to use. Able to integrate a product with other services. Capable of ensuring products get used. Able to realise benefits by linking work in progress back to the business case. Able to build business cases based on user needs.
Lifecycle perspective	Understands the different phases of product delivery and is able to contribute to, plan or run these. Able to maintain a product or process through the delivery phases, through to live and into retirement. Able to lead a team through the different phases of the delivery lifecycle. Can maintain and iterate a product over time to continuously meet user needs. Understands and is aware of incident management and service support so that products are built effectively.	Expert	Able to successfully lead teams through the full product lifecycle. Able to identify which tools and techniques should be used at each stage. Able to develop sustainable support models. Able to identify and deal with potential risks across or between all phases of the lifecycle. Able to coach others. Able to contribute to the assessment of other teams, providing guidance and support as they move through the lifecycle phases.

3. Civil Service Success Profiles Framework

The Civil Service uses The Success Profiles Framework to assess candidates during recruitment.

It is a flexible framework, used to assess a range of experiences, abilities, strengths, behaviours and technical/professional skills required for different roles.

Find out more about Success Profiles.

4. Other roles in delivery management

There are 3 other role levels in delivery management:

• senior delivery manager
• delivery manager
• associate delivery manager