A few months back Neil Vass asked in the Agile in the Ether slack channel for advice for people looking to move into Delivery Management roles. I posted a bunch of replies, others did too. Before slack deletes all the replies I thought I would turn them into a blog post.

What is a delivery manager?

When I first started working as a delivery manager in 2015, job searches for the role mainly returned delivery driver and pizza delivery type roles, over the last 9 years the role has become much more established in both the public and private sector. For me Emily Webber’s post, Explaining the role of a delivery manager still holds true. It’s the person in the team responsible for ways of working, team health and happiness, and delivery support (especially in large orgs).

What advice did I give?

This was the advice I usually give to folks I talk to about becoming a delivery manager:

Welcome! Delivery people often come from different backgrounds, thats a super power not a detriment. Take a read of Jon Rhodes 5 minutes with series to see that most people fall into it.

Why do you want to be a DM? If it’s to enable teams of different people to get stuff done, good for you! As Philippa Newis succinctly put it, Delivery Management is asking’ how can I help, over when will it be done'

Join Agile in the Ether! Honestly the depth of advice and support given by this group is amazing, this sign up’s for monthly sessions go fast but if you do get on, there is an excellent slack group to turn to for advice and I still use regularly to share ideas and challenges in day to day work.

Write down what you’re learning. Preferably in a blog or weeknotes, but even if you don’t share publicly, reflecting on what you’re learning is important and helps embed skills.

Network and go to meetups. There is no better way to get yourself out there, talking about what you’re learning is just as interesting as being seen as an expert.

Reality isn’t always the same as expectation. Delivery Management isn’t just being an agile coach, you’re actively in the team helping them get shit done, often in organisations that maybe haven’t fully embraced agile ways of working. Having some backup project management skills is useful as often the roles get confused, being able to explain and navigate what does and doesn’t work for agile teams in a traditional project management context can be a super power.

Training. I cant say that any formal qualifications have been useful personally, but I can see the appeal in having them on your CV. Just go into it knowing there is a large certificate-industrial complex around agile and you may not get a lot of value for money.

Don’t sweat the tech stuff. This is probably the question I get asked the most, do I have to be technical? My answer is always that there are people in other roles in the team that will be able to know this more than you do. I would argue you need a reasonable level of understanding of all the roles in the team in order to be able to support them (especially, tech, product, ux), but you don’t need to be an expert in any of them.

What did others say?

Lots of other folks contributed to the chat too, here are some of their thoughts:

“I moved from recruitment into project management (and then delivery management) about 4 years ago. I went into civil service as they hire based on competency and were looking for leadership, organisation, communication skills which I was able to demonstrate in other contexts.”

“From a self-learning perspective, I don’t think that they need to do certifications (scrum etc), but think it’d be really valuable for them to become familiar with various methodologies/ways of working, if they’re coming from outside of tech and don’t have experience with that - mainly because other people talk about them all the time, so it’ll help them make sense of what might be being asked of them a lot.

“I think the most important skill as a Delivery person is being a good communicator, it definitely helps with trust building etc if you have some sort of understanding of the various roles in a team.”

In conclusion

Delivery management is still a relatively new role in a lot of organisations, hopefully these tips are useful if you fancy the move. If you are a delivery manager, what advice would you give to someone making thinking of becoming one?