A day in the life: Delivery Lead

By Sam Atcha – Consultant Delivery Lead

Welcome to the first blog in our ‘A day in the life’ series. The aim of this series of blogs is to give you an insight into what a typical day looks like for our different team members here at synvert TCM (formerly Crimson Macaw). Hopefully, you find something inspirational to take away from it.

What I’m responsible for…

Delivery sounds pretty straightforward, so people naturally assume I deliver in some way. Which I can’t argue with, but in reality, it’s so much more. I am the glue – the network – between our development and data engineering team, our client, and our stakeholders. It is my job as a Consultant Delivery Lead to make sure each party is informed, motivated and even, inspired.

On projects, I am in everyone’s business – CC’d into every single email no matter the subject; to do my job well I need full visibility. But living in this post-covid world which we do now, I’ve revisited that feeling. No more of that talk, with teams working at a distance and with communication stretched, we need the glue more than ever now. Delivery Leads, assemble! We follow the scrum/agile methodology, so we make sure teams use the framework to deliver our projects.

I support the teams by observing how they work and seeing if there are any gaps. Sometimes those gaps might be filled by facilitating interaction between two different services and organising retro sessions where we look back and see what worked and what didn’t. I’ll get them to talk to each other and align their expectations through a series of actions. It sounds simple, but sometimes people forget to talk to each other!

Delivery Lead

I got the job…

I don’t come from a tech background. I’ve over 9 years of Project Management experience under my belt varying from IT, Telecoms and Cyber Security working in a more traditional waterfall environment. I wanted to try something different and get into Agile-based projects. I loved this environment and interacting with Data Engineers. I’m also a natural at doing things in an agile manner. With agile, you’re utilising their potential and they can tell us what the best way of doing this is. I enjoy the sense of achievement I get from it. I think it’s a fun sector!

My typical day…

First thing in the morning we have both client and internal stand-ups where the team plans and tells each other what they are going to do to achieve the goals for the day. During those stand-up calls I always make sure all the dots are connected between us and ultimately ensure any blockers are raised and addressed.

My current squad team, I must say are awesome (totally not biased), we have a great bunch of hard-working team members and a great working relationship. The team work very well in educating the stakeholders on how to approach certain areas and make sure we can adapt to the changes. We are a team that can handle whatever is thrown at us.

Project blockers come in all shapes and sizes, most have negative impacts and risk factors involved in terms of delays in delivering a phase to our stakeholders. In order to know your potential blockers well, it is a matter of getting to know them, what triggers them and always trying to be on the ball and think ahead of the issues if possible. Maintaining risk, issue and decision logs enable me not only to keep track but also to manage blockers.

The best part of my job…

What I love is how everybody within synvert TCM is committed to making things right. That’s an environment I’ve always wanted in my personal life but being in an organisation that is like this is great. I’ve never been so free to do what I feel is right. Here you get a lot of freedom, and it works well. You can fail and make mistakes and learn and become even better.

My one piece of advice for aspiring women in Tech…

Whatever your dream of doing, do it. If you’re working hard for it, just do it. Make yourself heard and seen through your talent and skills, not because you’re a woman.

Want to read more of our blogs? Check them out here.