Senior Delivery Lead

This role leads the delivery of ongoing technology services and initiatives for some of the biggest names in European and international sport. It takes new initiatives from first conversation through to release and into ongoing operation, planning them into live delivery alongside support, maintenance and ad hoc work. The post-holder owns the integrated delivery plan, brings scope, schedule, cost, quality and risk together, and acts as a senior voice in the client relationship alongside the Customer Service Manager.

• Build and own integrated delivery plans across scope, schedule, cost, risk and dependencies, including work spanning multiple teams, and keep clients, product owners, engineers and suppliers aligned.
• Lead proactive scope management to protect milestones and timeboxes, challenging scope decisions, guiding stakeholders to prioritise by value, deferring lower-priority work using MVP thinking and clear change control, and helping clients make informed scope decisions.
• Ensure acceptance and release-readiness criteria exist and are applied, facilitate their completeness, and use defect and incident trends to keep quality high.
• Facilitate conversations on balancing new features against non-functional requirements such as performance, reliability and maintainability, and advocate for them with the client so shipped services keep working on match day.
• Manage milestones and the critical path against client and season deadlines, and forecast from delivery data so recovery options are available early.
• Maintain a living risk and issue register, escalating with options rather than just problems, track effort and forecasts, explain the cost of scope and timing decisions, and keep delivery within the commercial agreement.
• Make the case for the right team size and skill mix for sustainable delivery, report status clearly through RAG and RAID reporting, demos and executive updates, and translate between business needs and technical delivery to guide sensible technical trade-offs.
• Work with the team to break epics and releases into well-understood, prioritised work with visible dependencies, and apply Agile and Lean practices pragmatically, such as Scrum for execution and flow-based approaches like Kanban for support work.
• Set realistic commitments, deliver them, flag blockers early, agree roles and expectations with clients and suppliers, and judge change on the value it adds.
• Act as escalation point for engagements, including through releases and live events, and own responses to escalations from live operations and L3 support that need developer investigation or fixes, including client communication and impact on planned work.
• Co-own the client relationship with the Customer Service Manager, agreeing risks, trade-offs and expectation messages before they go to the client so the client hears one voice, and bring clients along on hard messages by framing issues with a recommended way forward
• Drawing out what is really needed, and securing agreement.
• Work with whoever owns requirements on the client side to turn client needs into high-level requirements the team can refine and plan, covering and coaching where that capability is still developing.
• Facilitate sprint reviews, retrospectives and post-implementation reviews that change how the team works, and where the team runs them well, ensure they continue to happen and remain effective.
• Communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, keep handovers, closure reports and lessons learned up to date, and build strong relationships across engineering, product and client teams while keeping disagreement constructive.

• A tertiary qualification in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, Project Management or a related field, or equivalent professional experience delivering technology projects.
• Typically 8 or more years in professional delivery roles, leading ongoing technology services, projects or releases end to end.
• A technical background, for example as a Developer, Tech Lead, Solutions Architect or technical delivery manager, with a working knowledge of the SDLC, cloud services, APIs, data feeds and integrations, and the depth to challenge estimates and technical approaches with senior engineers.
• A track record of delivering with integrated planning, change control, critical-path and risk management, and release readiness.
• A track record of owning the overall delivery plan and making decisions under ambiguity and contention, including finding a fix rather than only raising the problem.
• In-depth knowledge of Agile and Lean, with hands-on Scrum experience, using delivery data to forecast and re-plan, and anchoring delivery to plan, milestones and timeboxes rather than being sprint-led.
• An outcome focus, delivering value early, building fast feedback loops and making decisions from data.
• Confident reporting to and influencing sponsors, clients and executives, including delivering difficult messages in a way that brings them along, in writing and in the room.
• Experience managing a client relationship alongside an account or service manager, including managing expectations and scope.
• Experience facilitating workshops and building consensus between stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Experience making sure delivery meets governance, compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Requirements gathering, analysis and documentation, including shaping high-level requirements with a client Product Owner.
• Proficiency with Jira and Confluence, and reporting tools such as Excel or Power BI.
• Ability to stay calm, plan ahead and make good calls under pressure in an environment of live match days and fixed season deadlines.

• Recognised project delivery certification, for example PMP, APM PQ or PRINCE2, together with a Scrum certification such as PSM or CSM.
• Membership of a professional body such as APM or PMI, and working knowledge of ITIL, BABOK or Lean/Kanban.
• Mentoring teammates and less experienced Delivery Leads or delivery staff.
• Owning project budgets and explaining the financial impact of delivery decisions.
• Managing suppliers and vendors, including contracts, SOWs and SLAs.
• Leading delivery across multiple teams.
• Coaching teams towards agility, safety and continuous learning, and turning around struggling teams.
• Experience with time and capacity tools such as Tempo.
• Experience in live, time-critical or match-day operations.
• Delivery experience in a UK or European commercial context.
• A genuine interest in sport and a willingness to get into the detail of the sports data you deliver.