Senior Delivery Manager - Department for Education - G7

Location

Coventry, West Midlands (England), CV1 2WT : Manchester, North West England, M1 2WD : Sheffield, Yorkshire and the Humber, S1 2FJ : City of Westminster, London (region), SW1P 3BT

About the job Job summary

The Service Delivery division supports one of the biggest funding operations anywhere across government. We ensure over £70bn of education and training funds are allocated, contracted and paid accurately and on time through our digital Funding Service made up of internal and external facing products. The service, and the funding operations it supports, works at pace to deliver a high-quality customer experience.

About the Team:

As a Senior Delivery Manager, you will be joining a friendly, motivated team looking to transform the user experience of receiving and managing education funding, as well as how our internal operators use the service. We view the education funding service as not just the digital element, but also the operational processes, the data in it and the whole journey both on and offline. All the divisions involved in the service take a holistic approach and all are focused on the needs of our users.

Job description

We are looking for a bright, empathetic and persuasive delivery manager with strong interpersonal skills who enjoys working in a fast paced, high profile, agile environment. We are looking for someone who believes that how you work is just as important as what you deliver, who is passionate about agile working, who cares about and has a background in digital delivery.

As a Senior Delivery Manager, you will be accountable for the delivery of complex, high-risk products and services. You will lead and support teams to plan and deliver work and engage senior stakeholders.

As a Senior Delivery Manager, you will:

• Build and maintain teams, ensuring they are motivated, collaborating and working well.
• Identify obstacles and help teams to overcome them.
• Focus teams on what is most important to the delivery of products and services.
• Encourage and facilitate continuous improvement of delivery teams.
• Coach and mentor both team members and others to apply the most appropriate Agile and Lean tools and techniques.
• Champion a user-centred approach to ensure products and services meet user.
• Actively participate in the agile delivery manager community -learning, sharing knowledge and bringing in good practice.
• Be part of a diverse, inclusive, supportive culture that stimulates innovation and enables high-performing teams to build and sustain quality products and delivery.

The complexity and breadth of products and teams will vary in this role, depending on the context.

For further information on what we expect from a Delivery Manager, please see the link below:

Find out more about working as a Delivery Manager

Person specification

Essential Criteria

• Lead teams using Agile practices and ways of working, continuously reflecting on and challenging their effectiveness.
• Manage the expectations of stakeholders at all levels and between organisational, technical and political boundaries, leading discussions about high risk and complexity.
• Optimise the team's delivery and actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including those where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists.
• Identify and challenge organisational processes that are unnecessarily complicated and be able to add value and coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes.
• Identify and fix issues in team dynamics, choosing the right approaches to drive forward the development of blended teams (made up of contractors and civil servants).
• Take a lead in advocating for a user-centred approach to delivering products and services, referencing relevant frameworks and approaches such as the GDS Service Standard.
• Excellent communication skills that are adaptable depending on the audience with proven ability to create effective collaboration across teams.

Desirable Criteria:

• Able to negotiate, influence and set budgets in complex environments.
• Demonstrate a significant track record of successfully delivering digital projects or products, leading, planning, coordinating and motivating multi -site/ multi- department teams through the full product lifecycle.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed at interview, in the event of a tie break situation, to make an informed decision.