Working at the Cumberland, you become part of something special. We're a Mutual organisation, committed to improving the lives of our colleagues, customers, and community. Our values are incredibly important to us.
We're on an exciting transformational journey with our people firmly at the forefront of our plans. If you want to work for a team integral in helping to drive cultural change, a team where you can bring your whole self to work bringing your energy and creativity to make a positive difference, then this is the job for you.
We have an exciting opportunity for a Delivery Lead to join our Technology team.
As our Delivery Lead, you'll navigate a variety of projects and coach the team through challenges using a variety of agile tools and techniques. You'll have a strong focus on successful outcomes and have a highly collaborative nature to bring people together to form shared understanding of the desired outcome and communicate vision.
The Benefits
- Salary - up to £44,535 p.a. - depending on skills and experience.
- Holidays - 25 days holiday plus public holidays and the opportunity to buy and sell up to 3 days.
- Learning and Development opportunities - We want you to grow in your role. We'll work together to support your personal and professional development.
- Hybrid Working - the tools and equipment you need to be able to work from home when you need to, depending on your role.
- Health and Wellbeing - a calendar of events and activities throughout the year, Mental Health & Wellbeing champions, and Cycle to Work scheme.
- Community Day - We offer our people an extra paid day off every year to help local charities and community organisations.
The Role
General
- Ensure that the vision and goals for the agile delivery team are well communicated and understood by its members.
- Work with the team's Product Owner, PM, BA and Stakeholders to ensure that collaborative agile working takes place.
- Have a strong focus on delivering project/ products and services that meet user needs.
- Help function leads with the recruitment for any replacements or additional team members to ensure that the agile delivery team is appropriately resourced.
- Ensure that any task management and documentation tooling is set up correctly for the team and is well maintained and meeting the team's needs.
Agile ways of working
- Ensure that the agile delivery team is cross-functional, empowered and self-organising.
- Ensure that the agile delivery team is following the agile delivery approach and agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) methods (Scrum and Kanban), so this becomes the standard approach for software projects / software product and service development in the Cumberland.
- Ensure that if the team is closely aligned within a delivery unit that the teams are effectively collaborating.
- Ensure that all the agile delivery team regularly (at least fortnightly) holds/partakes in show and tell sessions with the other delivery teams in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and implement common practices.
Safe and repeatable deployments
- Have a keen understanding of the end-to-end software release process including the delivery pipelines to help optimise regular releases and delivery of working software.
- Hold an understanding of safety regarding best practices in terms of data privacy and information security standards around test data.
- Ensure that the developers and testers tooling and frameworks are being followed correctly in order to assure quality.
Key agile SDLC practices
- Ensure that team members are attending the daily stand-ups and that the emphasis of the stand-ups is focussed on the Kanban board and the efficient flow of tasks through the board, starting from right to left.
- Ensure that wider project team members and relevant stakeholders are aware of the time of the daily stand-ups and understand the stand-up etiquette.
- Ensure that regular planning is taking place (fortnightly as a minimum, more frequently is desired, daily goals where necessary to drive delivery)
- Ensure that handoffs are reduced by facilitating full team collaboration in analysis, test analysis and planning.
- Ensure that testing is 'shifted left' through the use of the Kanban board and the effective breakdown of tasks into the smallest, testable, vertical slices.
Key agile delivery approach
- Ensure that the team strive towards always delivering iteratively and incrementally, to avoid mini-waterfall and big-bang.
- Ensure effective agile discovery, inception and MVP phases are undertaken.
- Ensure that post-MVP the same iterative and incremental approach is still being taken to improvements/feature development within a live service.
About You
You'll have significant experience in IT Software, people and team coaching, agile delivery methods and agile SDLC frameworks. We would ideally like experience of working within financial services or another highly regulated environment.
Skills, abilities and behaviours we'd like to see:
- Leadership: Able to articulate and communicate a sense of direction and commitment to people.
- Building relationships: Continually uses the combined and cooperative efforts of others. Develops credibility with all stakeholders and influences through democracy.
- Operational Excellence: Understand how strong operational delivery supports the vision and strategic plan and can lead large and complex programmes to delivery.
- Strategic Vision: Able to step back from day-to-day activities to view the business from a different perspective; to see the bigger picture, distil information, trends, and needs, to build credible strategies to achieve the desired vision and commercial outcomes.
- Commercial/Member Focus: Balances business acumen with a passion for the member; focuses on maximising competitive position and member loyalty, without compromising financial stability.
- Risk Aware: Possesses a deep understanding of the regulatory environment.