Agile Delivery Manager at Department for Work & Pensions, Leeds/Remote, £Contract Rate

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. As the UK’s biggest public service department, it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. As such, we operate on a scale that is almost unmatched anywhere in Europe and most people in Britain come into contact with us at some point in their lives.

Working with DWP, you will be helping us to drive our priorities to:

• Help people to move into work and support those already in work to progress, with the aim of increasing overall workforce participation
• Help people to plan and save for later life, while providing a safety net for those who need it now
• Provide effective, efficient, and innovative services to the millions of claimants who rely on us every day, including the most vulnerable in society
• Improve experience of our services while maximising value for money for the taxpayer.

An Agile Delivery Manager will deliver end to end projects including owning service delivery. They will deliver projects across all phases including Discovery, Alpha, Beta and subsequent lifecycle stages. Work with the team on a day-day basis and have a good understanding of the research, design and development activities to help track and deliver these. This includes, software engineering, business operational process design, user research, user experience design and aspects of policy development to help manage and set the pace for delivery. 

Acting as a servant-leader, they will ensure a productive work environment, building high performing teams where members are engaged with the work they are undertaking . They will support more experienced Agile Delivery Managers in delivering projects, help build delivery roadmaps or own parts of a bigger programme of work. They will actively track project financials and drive governance on their projects. They will work to share their knowledge and best practices with other agile delivery managers and actively work to increase their own knowledge and experience around agile techniques and tools.

Responsibilities

• Build a high performing team through encouraging continuous learning, adaptation and improvement.
• Utilise meaningful metrics in order to drive the team towards their goals and understand areas for improvement.
• Create a safe, supporting environment for the team, encouraging them to experiment and making failure a safe part of learning.
• Lead by example, acting as a servant-leader demonstrate the right behaviours. Deals with conflict and helps establish a team culture that allows for constructive criticism.
• Manage and build relationships with the teams, relevant stakeholders and third party sub-contractors utilising effective and appropriate governance mechanisms. Managing team dynamics to ensure the team is aligned to the same objectives.
• Work with Product Owners and other business teams to ensure that new products and services are delivered effectively to realise measurable benefits.
• Support Senior Agile Delivery Managers and Product Owners to define a delivery roadmap to show when features and associated outcomes and value are likely to be delivered.
• Drive the creation of the business case, co-ordinate activities across stakeholder groups. Iterate the business case throughout the lifecycle of the project.
• Facilitate workshops, meetings with a variety of stakeholders, driving out outcomes and establishing the pace of delivery.
• Manage risks, issues and dependencies (external and internal), taking responsibility by owning them till they are mitigated or resolved.
• Drive the pace of delivery across their project with support of the senior delivery managers, owning key blockers till they are resolved.
• Manage external assurance groups so that they are appropriately engaged and aware to avoid any risks related to formal approvals.
• Ensure funding is in place and track spending and forecasts regularly and accurately.
• Lead agile events across the project, ensuring business and delivery teams are working to a common objective and vision to deliver specific outcomes.
• Follow standards of agile practices set by the agile delivery manager community, helping senior delivery managers to adapt and/or adopt agile methods and tools for use on projects.

Essential: