The Delivery Function — What’s the point of it?

In March 2021 the Agile Roundabout asked me to talk about the delivery function, what it means to me, and where delivery managers can make a difference. I am passionate about product delivery so I was delighted to share my thoughts on the discipline and its role within BBC Sounds.
(disclaimer: I left the BBC in June 2021)

You can watch the video of my talk or you can read the paper below.

Enjoy! :)

The Structure

The presentation and its script is divided into two parts; this article gives you an overview of role and its responsibilities, while the second article describes a real life case study to bring the role to life and show how the delivery function can make a difference. You can think of it Part 1: Theory and Part 2: Practice.

The Role of Agile Delivery

Delivery Managers help make our teams more effective and are accountable for driving the delivery process of our products and services towards outcomes.

While the above definition is great it is worth unpacking. To “drive the delivery process of products towards outcomes” the Delivery Function needs to operate on three levels with a different focus. These are:

1. Strategic Business Level
2. Product Area or Department Level
3. Team Level

The Levels of Successful Product Delivery

Let’s discuss these three areas in more detail.

The role of Delivery on a Strategic Business Level

Most large organisations have a complex landscape when it comes to strategy setting. If you look, you can find strategic ambitions expressed on multiple business levels, different planning horizons, in vertical business units and in different functions or disciplines. How can teams know what all the strategies are and which one should they be focusing on? And how does the business know if that is right and weather it is being worked on?

Delivery Managers are there to help the business make sense of this complex landscape and turn the different (and sometimes competing or contradicting) strategies into clear and specific delivery outcomes.

On the strategic business level delivery helps turning the different business strategies into a clear delivery focus and coherent narrative for teams.

Once the focus is clarified and we know what we want to achieve on a strategic level, the organisation needs to find a way to cascade that down to teams on the ground. Teams then also need to find a way to communicate results back up to allow the business to realise results and to iterate or pivot based on feedback. Sounds easy, right?

The Delivery function is responsible for building the lightweight processes that support teams creating objectives that ladder up to overarching strategies.

To cover all this you should find your delivery managers thinking about the following questions:

• How can we turn all the different strategies into a clear focus and narrative and cascade that down to the teams?
• How can we help teams see how their objectives and plans fit within the bigger picture and contribute to the business’ overall success?
• What metrics do we need to implement to understand the progress we are making?

The role of Delivery on a Product or Product Area level

As BBC Sounds scaled it faced the issue a growing number of teams. What’s the challenge with that?

These teams need to be independent to solve problems effectively, move fast and grow expertise in their ownership area. While small fast moving teams are great, having a bunch of independent teams increases the likelihood of cross team dependencies and the amount of effort teams spent aligning, coordinating and waiting for each other. Urgh.

Delivery Managers are responsible to organise the chaos that can occur when multiple teams have to work together to deliver results.

On product or product area level the Delivery function spends its time thinking about the following questions:

• How should we organise the different teams in the product or product area to get the most out of our collective efforts?
• As a product, how can we work better collectively to deliver value faster to our users?
• How can we shorten feedback loops and avoid rework?

As the Agile Delivery Lead in BBC Sounds this challenge was where I spent most of my time. My aim was to create ways of working that optimise for fast moving individual teams AND for a fast moving organisation. You can read how that turned out the case study later here.

The role of Delivery on the Team level

This is the agile delivery manager’s bread and butter that underpins all our efforts. In BBC Sounds each team has an embedded delivery manager working in the team to help the team work their best.

On a team level the Delivery Manager helps agile teams to be effective.

How do we do this? Delivery covers three core aspects to create and maintain effective agile teams:

I. Delivery Mechanics

• Managing the delivery processes ensuring there is an iterative plan to work towards with tight feedback loops
• Maintaining the delivery momentum and managing blockers, risks and impediments

II. Team dynamics

• Taking the lead on establishing healthy team dynamics and routines
• Making sure the team is working well and members are happy

III. Lean and agile practices

• Coaching teams on agile and lean techniques and helps them apply them as needed.
• Creating an environment where continuous improvements of teams’ working practices can happen, including measuring success, inspecting and adapting

Principles for Good Agile Delivery

Delivery Managers move across these focus areas constantly. They will be working with their stakeholders identifying the strategic direction and the priorities for the quarter coming, they will be working with multiple teams to deliver a complex cross team Initiative, and will be facilitating their team ways of working ensuring everyday team effectiveness. Delivery Managers are busy people.

So to keep all delivery managers aligned within iPlayer and Sounds the discipline relies on a shared set of principles to ensure good delivery across the piece. These are:

• High team collaboration, trust and communication
• Reliably delivering value based on audience need and impact
• Sustain a predictable pace and quality of development
• Having a rhythm and cadence to delivery
• Fostering a culture of continuous improvement
• Make progress visible
• Focus on completion
• Limit Work in Progress and swarm when possible

Hopefully this is a good enough overview on what the Delivery Function is all about. If not, please let me know!

And to see how all these actually work in real life and how the discipline helps product organisations deliver results, head over here and read The Role of Agile Delivery — The Case Study.