Taking Farmers to Markets Service Delivery Handbook

Program management team

Draft for discussion

# Delivery leads

The delivery leads work at a service line level and support multiple product teams.

They understand:

  • the service line deliverables for each product
  • what work is outstanding
  • the sequence of activities needed to achieve our commitments for the quarter and the tranche.

The leads set the right delivery expectations with stakeholders and manage issues and risk within a service line.

The role:

  • anticipates delivery bottlenecks and proactively manage these
  • understands, manages and communicates change impacts
  • identifies and traverses technical and non-technical dependencies
  • resolves conflict between product- and program-centric priorities
  • reports clearly and concisely to support evidence-based decision making and assessment of trade-offs - this includes translating and communicating complex problems into easy-to-understand formats.

# Issues and risk

Delivery leads are responsible for ensuring issues and risks within a service line are documented and managed.

They provide a first line of escalation point for issues and risks from product teams.

They also interface between the service line and the broader program for issue and risk escalation and treatment.

# Dependencies

Delivery leads are accountable for managing dependencies within a service line and responsible for managing dependencies between service lines.

# Planning and orchestration

Delivery leads ensure teams within a service line have realistic and achievable plans for each quarter.

They ensure teams within a service line are appropriately coordinated and activities sequenced to avoid bottlenecks and cross-team delays.

# Reporting

Delivery leads are responsible for ensuring teams within a service line produce clear and meaningful reporting against milestones and agreed measures of success - OKRs (objectives and key results) and so on.

# Leadership

Delivery leads provide support, mentoring, guidance and advocacy for the delivery managers within the product teams.