What is Delivery Management?

Delivery Management is an important, critical aspect of software delivery. It is the process of tracking, managing, and ensuring successful delivery of a product, project, or program.

Delivery Management and Project Management have few areas of functional overlap. But they differ in multiple ways. Project Management tracks the day-to-day activities of the project to ensure project milestones are being met and any blockers or challenges for the team are being out rightly mitigated to ensure smooth project execution. Delivery Management is the fifty feet from the ground view of project activities. It is a broader function atop Project Management. A Delivery Manager must ensure customer happiness and satisfaction in addition to ensuring major project milestones are achieved. A Project Manager can list out the challenges and blockers for the team. A Delivery Manager must work towards ensuring that all those challenges and blockers are resolved.

Scope of Delivery Management

• Tracking project/program milestones and deliveries
• Tracking quality of deliveries
• Ensuring regular customer traction and status updates
• Ensuring business continuity and healthy pipeline of project work
• Ensuring customer satisfaction
• Mitigating open issues and challenges for team and customer

Team’s Contribution to Successful Delivery Management

The delivery team plays an important role in smooth execution of Delivery Management function. It is the team which interacts with the Customer on a regular basis and owns the product being developed. It is the team which can ensure quality of the product.

The Delivery Manager is dependent on the team members to keep him/her updated on the status of the project. If accurate and timely data does not reach the Delivery Manager or the project team does not keep the Delivery Manager updated on blockers and open issues in the project, the Delivery Manager will be handicapped. And he/she will unable able to deliver on the objectives of their role.

If a customer is dissatisfied with the performance of the delivery team or there are major blockers in the project that the Delivery manager is unaware of, it will negatively impact the project in the long run.

The delivery team is an important cog in the wheel of Delivery Management function.

Takeaways of Successful Delivery Management

In any company if the Delivery Management function is executed successfully the following will be achieved:

• Happy and satisfied customer
• Happy and engaged team members
• Continuing business engagement with the customer

A healthy Delivery Management function is a win-win for all.