The Agile Delivery Manager Role at Babylon Explained
An introduction to the role and its responsibilities
In today’s newsletter we step away from looking at other companies to look at my own personal role, and what an Agile Delivery Manager is. If you are interested in learning about a real-world agile implementation every week from the likes of Porsche, Spotify or LEGO, don’t forget to subscribe at the link below.
My role at Babylon is a Lead Agile Delivery Manager. We have a team of Agile Delivery Managers (ADMs for short), who work directly with software teams to get things done. In this newsletter I wanted to cover why we have ADMs, what their role is, and how it differs from agile coaches and other agile roles.
Disclaimer: This is my understanding of the role based on my experience here, and not official Babylon definition of the role. Let’s dive in.
Why Agile Delivery Managers?
Whilst Babylon cares deeply about agile principles, there are some additional responsibilities on top of the frameworks that we think are important to include in the ADM role as a permanent accountability. In particular, these are:
Coordinating planning on a longer time frame than a sprint - in our experience, product doing this planning in place of an ADM is not effective in terms of robust planning and tracking status against goals. ADMs are better placed to do this. This includes managing dependencies across teams to deliver features.
Tool Management - agile tooling such as JIRA, Confluence and JIRA Structure are important to be well maintained and looked after to allow for efficient workflows. This responsibility falls best with the process focus of Agile Delivery Managers.
Release Management - the team continue to seek to automate the release process, but working for a healthcare company, there is co-ordination needed with clinical safety, regulatory, data privacy and other stakeholders in order to get releases out the door. ADMs help to run this process and look for improvments.
Framework agnostic - Babylon utilises Scrum, Kanban, and borrows methods from a number of scaling frameworks. The title Agile Delivery Manager gives flexibility for the role to borrow from multiple frameworks.
What does an Agile Delivery Manager do?
ADMs are accountable for one thing: the performance of the engineering team. If the engineering team is not delivering effectively, this can be attributed to the ADM. Similarly, Agile Delivery Managers should be celebrated for successful performance of the engineering team. They focus on the team as a whole, and optimising the delivery of value to customers through the team working together in an effective manner.
The sub-responsibilities of the ADMs can therefore be categorised as (some repetition from the above why):
Establishing effective Scrum and Kanban principles and practices within teams - ensuring that the team understands scrum and Kanban and uses the framework correctly.
Ensure effective facilitation of Scrum ceremonies - the ADM should ensure the effective running of Scrum ceremonies, although they may not facilitate these himself.
Remove impediments - fix problems for the team that is slowing them down outside the team.
Setting up of agile tooling - ensuring the set up of JIRA, Confluence, Retro and Refinement tooling to ensure effective events.
Managing dependencies between teams - coordinating dependencies across Scrum teams and aligning dependencies as part of planning cycles can be crucial to prevent the team from being blocked.
Execute team quarterly planning cycles - teams plan on a quarterly basis at Babylon in order to help manage dependencies, risks, and make commitments to the wider business. ADMs are responsible for completing this exercise.
Produce effective reporting and metrics - identify the delivery metrics and reporting that ensures the team are focussing on what matters and driving continuous improvement.
Co-ordinate releases to unblock the team - engaging with clinical safety, regulatory, data privacy and security is a sizable task for getting releases out in a medical device regulated environment. ADMs take the lead in streamlining the process.
Contributing to developing an agile culture at Babylon
How does it differ from other agile roles like agile coach?
Whereas agile coach typically focuses solely on imparting agile ways of working on teams as an outsider, ADMs are an embedded part of the team that have much more accountability for the performance of the team, and the results. ADMs help to drive the business forward towards its goals through their expertise in agile ways of working and their active role in planning and managing delivery.
I hope this article was helpful and useful. Let me know how you structure your agile roles, and how it works for you!