Purpose
The Director of Delivery & Ways of Working is accountable for end-to-end strategic delivery execution and the effectiveness of delivery ways of working across the organisation. This role ensures that strategy is translated into predictable, high-quality outcomes through strong delivery governance, mature agile practices, empiricism, and continuous improvement.
The role partners closely with Technology, Product Owners and Business leaders to remove delivery friction, increase stakeholder confidence, and enable teams to operate with clarity, pace and accountability.
Responsibilities
- Owns organisation-wide delivery outcomes across strategic and operational initiatives.
- Accountable for last-mile delivery, ensuring commitments are translated into delivered value.
- Establishes and maintains delivery roadmaps aligned to business priorities and capacity.
- Ensures dependencies, risks and constraints are actively managed and surfaced early.
- Owns and evolves the organisation's delivery ways of working, ensuring pragmatism over process.
- Sets clear expectations on agile principles, empiricism and outcome-driven execution (not 'ceremony compliance').
- Ensures teams apply agile consistently while allowing appropriate context-driven flexibility.
- Drives continuous improvement based on evidence, metrics and feedback rather than opinion.
- Accountable for delivery performance against agreed service levels where applicable.
- Ensures delivery teams operate with clear ownership, escalation paths and feedback loops.
- Enables teams to respond effectively to change without destabilising delivery.
- Drives continual improvement in delivery reliability and stakeholder satisfaction.
- Provides leadership and direction to Scrum Masters and delivery roles.
- Ensures Scrum Masters operate as agents of flow, not process administrators.
- Builds delivery capability through coaching, mentoring and targeted training.
- Champions a culture of accountability, learning and continuous improvement.
- Defines and owns delivery metrics that provide meaningful insight into flow, predictability, quality and outcomes.
- Ensures data is used to guide decisions, prioritisation and improvement.
- Builds transparency and trust with stakeholders through clear, honest reporting.
- Eliminates vanity metrics in favour of measures that drive learning and action.
- Acts as a senior interface between delivery teams and business stakeholders.
- Improves stakeholder maturity by setting clear delivery expectations, roles and decision rights.
- Enables better collaboration, faster decision-making and reduced delivery friction.
- Supports executive stakeholders with clear delivery insights, risks and options.
- Owns delivery input into strategic planning, PI planning and quarterly planning cycles.
- Ensures roadmaps are realistic, prioritised and grounded in capacity and capability.
- Balances short-term execution with longer-term strategic outcomes.
- Supports 'now, next, later' planning whilst maintaining accountability to agreed commitments.
Decisions
In this role I take decisions on:
- Delivery priorities, sequencing and trade-offs across strategic and operational initiatives
- Delivery commitments, scope adjustment and last-mile execution decisions
- Delivery ways of working, agile guardrails and pragmatic process changes
- Delivery metrics, reporting structure and transparency standards
- Escalation paths, risk responses and corrective interventions
- Resourcing and capacity allocation from a delivery perspective
- Technology, Product and Business Leaders on strategic delivery priorities
- Scrum Masters and Delivery Leads on execution approach and continuous improvement
- Senior stakeholders on delivery risk, dependency management and expectation setting
Recurring tasks
In this role I take care of:
- Delivery reviews and roadmap health checks
- Metrics, flow and outcome analysis
- Stakeholder delivery updates and risk conversations
- PI / quarterly planning preparation and facilitation
- Continuous improvement and ways-of-working evolution
- Coaching Scrum Masters and delivery leads
Approach to decision-making
My approach to decision-making is centred on outcome ownership, empiricism and pragmatism. When delivery challenges arise, I seek to understand the root cause using evidence, delivery data and team insight before acting. I optimise for flow, predictability and value, not theoretical perfection or rigid adherence to frameworks.
If a Delivery or Technology Lead raises a constraint or risk, I work with them to determine whether it can be resolved through improved ways of working, sequencing or stakeholder alignment. Where trade-offs are required, I make decisions that protect delivery confidence and long-term trust.
For roadmap, PI and quarterly planning decisions, I work closely with Technology, Product and Business leaders to ensure commitments are grounded in capacity, capability and clear priorities. When communicating with senior stakeholders, I provide clear, honest delivery insight, explicitly calling out risks, constraints and options so informed decisions can be made with confidence.