Delivery Manager

The Delivery Manager defines and runs the rhythm of planning, execution, and review across teams; acts as the stage gate that ensures work only progresses when it genuinely meets the bar; and builds and maintains a realistic delivery plan. The Delivery Manager is accountable for ensuring delivery happens on time, at quality, and predictably.

Responsibilities:

• Define, document, and continuously improve the team's delivery cadence, including sprint or iteration length, ceremony schedule, and reporting rhythm.
• Ensure the delivery cadence is followed, with ceremonies happening on schedule, involving the right people, and producing clear decisions.
• Adapt cadence to the needs of different workstreams without creating inconsistent processes across the organisation.
• Own projects end to end.
• Own the criteria for moving work between stages such as Discovery, Ready for Build, In Progress, Review, and Release, and enforce them consistently.
• Act as the checkpoint before work advances by confirming acceptance criteria are met, dependencies are cleared, risk and compliance sign-offs are in place, and the Definition of Done is completed.
• Intervene when work is not ready to progress and clearly communicate what is missing to pass the gate.
• Track and report exceptions or waivers when a gate is bypassed and ensure it is a deliberate decision.
• Build delivery plans grounded in real data, including backlog sizing, team velocity history, known dependencies, and risk.
• Convert scope and velocity into realistic timelines and communicate them as ranges with clear assumptions and confidence levels.
• Re-forecast plans regularly as scope, velocity, or risk changes, and proactively flag slippage.
• Maintain visibility tools such as burnup and burndown charts, roadmap views, and RAID logs to enable stakeholders to self-serve status.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for delivery status to leadership and stakeholders, translating team-level detail into a clear picture of progress, risk, and trade-offs.
• Identify and actively manage cross-team dependencies, blockers, and resourcing conflicts before they affect the critical path.
• Facilitate trade-off conversations across scope, time, and quality using data.
• Provide predictable reporting with variance within 5% and ensure accuracy in weekly reporting.
• Communicate proactively on go-live activities, post-go-live reports, and stakeholder updates.
• Own delivery process documentation, including workflow stages, gate criteria, estimation methods, and ceremony structure, and keep it current in tools such as Confluence.
• Run retrospectives that result in meaningful process improvements.
• Balance rigour with pragmatism by adding process where it reduces risk or ambiguity and removing unnecessary process.

Requirements:

• Experience with Agile and Scrum delivery.
• Experience managing end-to-end project delivery.
• Strong capability in delivery planning and estimation.
• Experience with delivery forecasting and velocity management.
• Knowledge of stage-gate and release readiness processes.
• Ability to manage cross-team dependencies effectively.
• Strong stakeholder and leadership management skills.
• Experience in risk and escalation management.
• Proficiency in delivery reporting and metrics.
• Experience with RAID, burndown, and burnup tracking.
• Strong process governance and documentation skills.
• Commitment to continuous improvement.
• Hands-on experience with Confluence and Jira.