Delivery Lead

Location: UK or Poland

(residents only - relocation and sponsorship not provided)

Role purpose

This role bears accountability for health, flow, and continuous improvement of the delivery team. The Delivery Lead assumes a critical role, driving motivation, and overseeing the performance of multi-disciplinary product and project delivery teams. The Delivery Lead focuses on removing blockers, facilitating lean processes, and ensuring the team can deliver value at a sustainable pace. Responsible for orchestrating the seamless execution of value delivery, the Delivery Lead navigates the intricacies of product and digital development with an emphasis on efficiency, collaboration, and high performance. From initiation to implementation, this role takes charge of product team's delivery, fostering a culture of motivation and collaboration to ensure the successful realization of E&E products and projects.

Main accountabilities

Facilitating Flow & Value and Problem Solving:

• Initiate, develop, and maintain effective relationships and engagement with owners and stakeholders dispersed across the globe.
• Identify issues and blockers and work with all parties to find suitable resolutions.
• Encourage and facilitate continuous improvement of the delivery team.
• Optimizing the end-to-end delivery flow and reducing lead time.
• Facilitate key ceremonies (Scrum, Kanban, or Lean) to ensure alignment and clarity
• Manage dependencies by partnering with "upstream" and "downstream" to ensure other teams provide what is needed on time.

Functional Expertise:

• Own the delivery of digital products and projects assigned to this role, acting as either a servant or delivery leader where appropriate.
• Coach and mentor both team members and others to apply the most appropriate Agile and Lean tools and techniques, whilst also being sympathetic to traditional project management approaches, helping the team self-organise
• With support from technical roles within Engineering effectively translate complex technical details ensuring they are accurately communicated to non-technical stakeholders.

Service Improvement:

• Creating a delivery ethos amongst all teams they lead.
• To be responsible for the communication of plans, risk and issue logs, and sprint backlogs as required.

Relationship and Stakeholder Management:

• Initiate, develop, and maintain effective relationships and engagement with owners and stakeholders, dispersed across the globe.
• Build and maintain delivery teams, ensuring they are motivated, collaborating, and working well, ensuring they focus the team on what is most important to the delivery of products and services.
• Maintain high levels of delivery transparency by utilising real-time metrics and dashboards, ensuring stakeholders have a clear, data-driven understanding of team flow, team velocity, bottlenecks, and release forecasts.
• Move from Push style communications (sending plans on Monday and reports on Friday) to pull style transparency (stakeholders looking at live dashboards)

Commercial and Financial Management:

• Collaborate with third-party partners to ensure they are integrated into the team's Agile workflow and culture.
• Ability to maintain delivery pace.

Role specific skills

• Experience of managing relevant digital / technology delivery.
• Be confident with delivering products and projects using different delivery frameworks as appropriate, including Agile, Lean and Waterfall.
• Ability to manage complex products/projects.
• Analyses requirements with the sponsor/stakeholders, defining specification, planning, revising, implementing an evaluating small to large, low to high-risk delivery.
• Experience of servant leadership - guide and coaching your team and organisation

through the delivery processes.

• Experience of ability to use formal and informal negotiating and motivation techniques to influence others behaviour and persuade them to think and act differently, while respecting differences of view and culture.
• Experience of co-ordinating a diverse team with awareness of equality and diversity impact as part of the delivery specifications and handles changers in specification or plan to meet unexpected circumstances.

Role specific knowledge and experience

Minimum/essential

• Varied knowledge and demonstrable experience of delivery in an Agile environment.
• Ability to liaise with senior management stakeholders, business users, PMO Programme level colleagues managing third party suppliers to deliver suitable solutions.
• Understand the fundamentals of the Agile framework (such as iterative development using incremental delivery).
• Experience of using formal planning tools to create delivery plans where appropriate (for example Miro, Jira, Confluence, Planner etc)
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills using various tools including Outlook, Word, Teams, Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Deep understanding of Kanban metrics (Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput) and how to use data to drive team improvement.
• Experience in conflict resolution and high-performance team dynamics.
• Fluency in English
• Current residency either in the UK or Poland with unlimited right to work.

Success will be measured by:

• System Stability: Establishing a predictable delivery cadence.
• Continuous Improvement: Demonstrable reduction in Cycle Time and removal of recurring blockers.
• Transparency: Maintaining real-time, data-driven dashboards (e.g., Jira Control Charts) that provide stakeholders with a clear view of progress without needing manual status reports.
• Agile Maturity: Increasing the team's self-organisation capabilities, as evidenced by reduced dependency on the Lead for daily task allocation.

Desirable

• Experience of leading, coordinating and organising remote teams across multiple

time zones in a collaborative environment.

• Demonstrates the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to changes and ability to prioritise.
• Experience of infrastructure, product and rollout projects is highly desirable and would be advantageous.

Education

Degree level qualification or equivalent by experience

Professional Qualification and Certification

Agile Scrum (CSM or PSM) or Kanban (KMP) - essential

Scaled Agile (SAFe RTE or LSS) - optional

Azure Cloud Practitioner - optional

British Council values and behaviours

British council values and behaviours are applicable across our organisation, in all roles and at all levels. They are important because they say what we stand for at the British Council and help us to deliver our strategy. We use them to guide our decision making, as well as guiding how we treat one another and the people we work with. These will be assessed in the selection process. Our values are: Open and Committed; Expert and Inclusive; Optimistic and Bold.

Unit: English & Exams / Product / Delivery and Governance

Work style: hybrid

Pay band: 8

UK annual salary range:

£38,000 - £46,000

Poland monthly salary (PLN)

16,300 - 21,700