Senior Delivery Manager

About the Role
This role serves as a senior business partner within the organization, playing a crucial part in linking business strategy, product priorities, and technology execution. It is responsible for leading complex cross-functional delivery, establishing and enhancing enterprise PMO capabilities, and integrating pragmatic agile and enterprise delivery frameworks that elevate transparency, prioritization, and business outcomes.
The role is structured around four essential outcomes:

• Business partnership: Transforming business priorities into a coherent, outcome-led portfolio while providing leaders with clear choices, evidence, and confidence.
• Enterprise PMO and governance: Creating proportionate standards, controls, and portfolio insights without hindering delivery.
• Delivery leadership: Removing impediments, managing dependencies, and delivering complex change predictably across teams, platforms, and events.
• Agile and product capability: Coaching Product Owners and teams to apply agile and lean practices, enhancing product thinking, and fostering continuous improvement.

Key Accountabilities
Responsibilities include:

• Strategic business partnering
  • Acting as a trusted delivery partner to senior business and technology leaders, with an in-depth understanding of strategic priorities, commercial drivers, operational pressures, and customer outcomes.
  • Translating strategy and business needs into prioritized roadmaps, clear delivery outcomes, and executable plans across functions, platforms, brands, and events.
  • Providing constructive challenge, evidence-based recommendations, and transparent trade-offs to support executive decisions on scope, sequencing, investment, and risk.
  • Building strong relationships across business units and fostering shared accountability for delivery outcomes, benefits, and adoption.
• Enterprise PMO and portfolio governance
  • Designing, establishing, and continuously maturing an enterprise PMO operating model, which includes demand intake, prioritization, business cases, stage gates, portfolio planning, assurance, reporting, and benefits tracking.
  • Introducing proportional enterprise delivery standards, governance, templates, and controls that work across agile, predictive, and hybrid delivery environments.
  • Creating a reliable enterprise portfolio view that covers outcomes, milestones, investment, capacity, dependencies, risks, issues, and decisions.
  • Establishing effective governance cadences and decision forums, ensuring clarity and timeliness in actions, ownership, and escalation routes.
  • Partnering with Finance, Product, Technology, and business leaders on investment planning, resource forecasting, portfolio scenarios, and value realization.
• Delivery leadership
  • Leading complex, business-critical programs and cross-functional initiatives from discovery through implementation, adoption, and benefits realization.
  • Owning integrated delivery plans and proactively managing scope, schedules, budgets, quality, risks, issues, assumptions, decisions, and cross-team dependencies.
  • Removing organizational and technology impediments while resolving ambiguity and creating conditions for efficient and consistent team delivery.
  • Holding teams and partners accountable for commitments while fostering a safe, collaborative environment for early escalation and problem-solving.
  • Managing third-party suppliers and consultants as required to meet delivery, commercial, and quality expectations.
• Agile, lean and product coaching
  • Coaching Product Owners on product vision, outcome-based roadmaps, value prioritization, backlog health, user stories, acceptance criteria, and effective stakeholder engagement.
  • Coaching delivery teams and leaders in Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and scaled enterprise practices, adapting approaches pragmatically based on the nature and risk of the work.
  • Facilitating high-value workshops, planning sessions, reviews, and retrospectives to create alignment, resolve decisions, and maintain momentum.
  • Building delivery capability through mentoring, communities of practice, playbooks, maturity assessments, and targeted learning interventions.
  • Promoting continuous improvement using flow, predictability, quality, customer, and value metrics rather than solely relying on activity measures.
• Performance, communication and organizational leadership
  • Producing concise, decision-oriented portfolio reporting for senior stakeholders, detailing narrative on progress, forecast, value, risk, and required actions.
  • Maintaining exceptional organization across multiple priorities, balancing strategic planning with hands-on intervention where delivery needs supporting.
  • Utilizing data to identify systemic delivery constraints and leading improvements in ways of working, governance, capability, and organizational design.
  • Role-modeling calm, inclusive, and accountable leadership, especially during changing priorities or under pressure in delivery.

Qualifications, Experience, & Skills
Key requirements for the role include:

• Extensive experience in leading complex technology-enabled business change, programs, or portfolios in a senior delivery, program, transformation, or PMO leadership role.
• Proven experience in establishing, transforming, or materially maturing an enterprise PMO or portfolio governance capability.
• Strong working knowledge of agile and lean delivery, alongside enterprise-scale and hybrid frameworks; able to select and tailor the right approach rather than applying a single methodology rigidly.
• Demonstrated ability to coach Product Owners and senior stakeholders in product thinking, prioritization, roadmaps, backlogs, outcome definition, and value realization.
• Exceptional skills in stakeholder management, influencing, and negotiation, with confidence to operate as a credible business partner at executive and senior leadership levels.
• Excellent organizational skills with the ability to create clarity, structure, and momentum across a large portfolio characterized by competing priorities and dependencies.
• Strong commercial acumen, including experience of investment cases, budgets, resource planning, suppliers, and benefits management.
• Evidence-driven approach to portfolio and delivery reporting, incorporating metrics on flow, predictability, quality, risk, and outcomes.
• Superior written and verbal communication skills, capable of simplifying complex information for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity with delivery tooling such as Jira and Confluence, along with portfolio reporting and collaboration platforms.
• A degree or equivalent professional experience. Relevant qualifications such as MSP, PgMP, PMP, PRINCE2, SAFe, Scrum, or ICAgile are desirable, though practical application is prioritized over certification alone.
• Experience in a multi-brand, international, events, media, or similarly fast-paced organization is advantageous.