The role of a Delivery Lead in 2023 — have we got it wrong?

You can’t apply knowledge that you don’t have.

By Damian Heffernan

Why do we expect our Scrum Masters / Delivery Managers / Delivery Leads / Iteration Managers to coach and teach as well as do? You can’t apply knowledge that you don’t have.

Do you want to be taught by a Coach, or coached by a teacher? Or both, by a doer? In my experience some coaches can teach, and I’m sure some teachers can coach but this isn’t a rule. And some of my best teachers have been lousy coaches and vice versa.

There’s a lot of advertisements at the moment for Scrum Masters, Delivery Leads, Iteration Managers. They all pretty much read the same, and have done for years.

These adverts are generally — “In addition to the skills you’ll need to do the tasks we want of you you also need……” something like this:

• Ensure correct cadence of ceremonies — PI planning, Scrum of Scrums, Daily Stand- up, retros

• Bring in new facets of the framework at the correct time as we grow in maturity

• Guide and coach our scrum masters

Or:

• Ability to coach and mentor other Scrum Masters

Or:

• Coach staff on agile project delivery skills, in order to achieve the business objectives.

Or:

• Ability to coach, including providing feedback and having difficult conversations

• Strong facilitation experience, including the ability to mentor others to facilitate Agile ceremonies

Or:

• You will empower, lead, and coach teams to be successful, self-organizing and adaptable to change.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Why does this “leadership” role generally have a coaching component when other “leadership” roles do not? Quotation marks used deliberately.

Have a look instead at other management roles in the same Companies.

Something like this:

• develop organisational strategies, oversee long-term budgetary planning and cost management, work with other department heads to align financial goals.

Or:

• participate in the ongoing strategic planning processes

Or:

• Ability to work with cross-functional teams to deliver on a common goal.

I’m not seeing any coaching, mentoring or teaching being asked of these leadership roles. And if there’s any training required in those teams they will pay for training or hire a trainer (teacher).

Our Delivery roles have actual real work to do and broad accountability and on top of these responsibilities, they are also expected to have the skills and experience to coach and mentor other team members in a variety of disciplines! In our industry, a Delivery Lead, Iteration Manager etc, is expected to have a wide range of skills and experience, including a knowledge of Agile frameworks, high level communication and facilitation skills, the ability to guide and coach scrum masters, and the list goes on. Seriously? This has to raise the question about the feasibility of finding all of these skills in one person.

Let’s take a look at coaching. And if so what type of coaching are we talking about? It’s certainly not coaching in the HR or learning and growth sense, which by the way takes training, skills and experience in it’s own right. Is it coaching in any type of sports or team sense?

In the sporting realm we have a wide variety of coaching examples for teams. One professional team has a Head Coach, a Player Development Coach, multiple assistant Coaches, a Performance Coach, an Athletic trainer (a type of Coach and member of the coaching staff), and a Strength and Conditioning Coach. All of these roles are important, highly skilled and bring different value to the Team.

Let’s try to map it to the environment where we’re hiring our DL and IM roles. In addition to the other duties required to be performed by our Iteration Manager (e.g. take on a leadership role and support teams in effective uptake in Agile/Agility to continue to develop new and improved ways of working, embed and drive use of team-based metrics to help the teams to understand and manage their delivery capacity and stakeholders, and to support continuous improvement culture within delivery teams.) which of the following coaching skills do they need to employ?

Is it (translate this into tech speak if you will)?:

• responsible for the offensive and defensive philosophies of the team and for strategy implementation

• responsibility to continuously monitor, improve and develop the skills of the players through court training

• Run training drills, teach skills, run practices

• supportive and guiding role to help you reach your full potential in your career

• specialises in preventing, diagnosing, and treating injuries and illnesses

• the design and implementation of programs to improve strength, speed/agility, power, nutrition, recuperation, and rehabilitation.

These “coaching” skills would be delivered by 6–9 different coaches in the sporting analogy. Is it feasible for one person to do all this?

Trying to find all of the skills and experience you need to do this in one person is rarely possible, more so why do we keep trying? It’s time to rethink the role of Iteration Manager, Delivery lead, scrum master and define those roles correctly and hire appropriately. Then have a good look at what this coaching role in the agile space is really for and define it appropriately too. Maybe you don’t need a full time coach, maybe you need some consulting, or some training or something else.

After 20+ years of trying to find all the skills and experience required for the role of IM/SM/Delivery Lead in one person, it may be time to experiment with a different approach. And then try some experiments and see if we can get it right. Or at least better.

I’d like to leave you with a lightly paraphrased quote from an Indian Pacers Coach: “The only coaching that makes a difference is GREAT coaching or terrible coaching, outside of that it comes down to the talent of the people.”