Delivery Lead

What the work actually is

You take an engagement from the day the assessment is signed off to the day we leave. You hold the schedule, ours and theirs. You get decisions out of the client, which is most of the job, because the usual reason a build slips is that someone at the client has not answered a question for eleven days.

You also make sure the person who will own the system is in the room while it is being built rather than introduced to it at the end. A system with no trained owner is a failure regardless of how well it was built, and that outcome is yours, not the engineer's.

Then you come back. 30 days after handover and 90 days after handover, you check what actually happened to the number the assessment promised, and you write down the honest version.

What you would be doing

• Run the schedule and the weekly client call.
• Chase decisions until you get them. Four times if it takes four times.
• Put the client's named owner into the build from the first week.
• Run the handover training and write the material they keep.
• Report at 30 and 90 days on what the system actually returned, including when it missed.
• Close the engagement. We do not convert to a retainer, so somebody has to end it properly.

What we are looking for

• You have run projects inside a company that was not a software company.
• You can teach a 55 year old operations manager a new system without making him feel slow.
• You keep written records without being asked, because you have been burned by not having them.
• You are comfortable telling a client that the delay is on their side.
• You have ended an engagement rather than extended one.

What we are not looking for

• Anyone whose job was mostly moving tickets across a board.
• Someone who measures success by how much the client still needs us.
• Certification collectors. We do not run a methodology and we are not going to adopt one.

Who should not apply

Do not apply if you want to manage people. You will manage one engagement, not a team, and that is the shape of the job for the next two years.

Do not apply if you dislike being the person who says the uncomfortable thing on a Friday call.

Do not apply if you are outside the United States. We would like to say otherwise, but we can only hire and contract there at the moment, so an application from anywhere else is one we have to turn down on paperwork rather than on merit. We would rather you knew that before you wrote it than after.

How to apply

Email us with your CV attached and tell us about a project that was late. Why it was late, what you did about it, and whether it worked.

We are more interested in the one that went wrong than the one that went well.