The Delivery Manager role at Kaplan

As you may know, a typical Scrum Master responsibilities include:

  1. Instills agile values in team
  2. Does anything possible to help team perform at highest level
  3. Protects team from over-committing (counter to PO)

The catch, for me, is you can have a team that has a great Scrum Master – great process – but the product that gets released isn’t used by students.  And who cares if you have great process if your product is a bust? So while the Delivery Manager also has deep knowledge of agile values, principles, and practices, she is a Product Owner / Tech Lead peer and is accountable for the same things as a PO/TL: code pushed to live rapidly that has a successful outcome.  This mindset is broader, more empowering, and more valuable.  For example, I’ve gravitated towards taking lead on metrics for my team, since I see this as the surest way to keep our team on course.  This isn’t necessarily a typical SM thing, but is natural for anyone with a DM mindset.   

In Marty Cagan’s view, the DM gets a “best-idea” hand-off from the PO’s discovery track and is then responsible for getting these best ideas through execution quickly and pushed to live.  DMs take point on other late-execution responsibilities, like releases and production issues.  Marty likes the role because it frees up the PO to focus on discovery so the team has a strong, validated backlog.  And we certainly want our Kaplan POs to focus on identifying insights through discovery, and then translating these insights to a strong backlog.  Without this focus, it can be easy for attention to stray to other, less important things, such as surfing the various waves of stakeholder opinion.  We also want to be explicit about including engineers in our discovery process. Other things successful DMs do:

  • Reduce cycle time in delivery of new work
  • Gain satisfaction of individuals in the organization
  • Can spin up new teams and make them effective and happy
  • Make an impact on the greater technical community, including presentations, writings, and meetups

As Kaplan continues to move to Cloud Ops, our DM responsibilities will shift in a subtle way.  DMs already participate in releases by scheduling them, organizing the people who participate in them, and then joining releases and smoothing over hiccups.  As we transition to Cloud Ops, I see the DM participation in releases continuing and becoming a more explicit responsibility.  I think we’ll find that it will be natural for DMs to assume Cloud Ops release management responsibilities, and I don’t think it will be a lot of additional work on our DM team, as we are already heavily involved. The one change that will be an adjustment is taking more post-prod defect calls and troubleshooting issues during nights and weekends.  The DM will likely need to work with the TL and play point in organizing these sessions, and that is not something our DMs (or our engineers) currently do all that often in our current state.  Our DM team is excited to take this challenge on over the weeks and months to come.

Terrence McGovern, Head of Delivery Management