Delivery Manager (3rd Line Support)

About Methods:

Methods is a £100M+ IT Services Consultancy who has partnered with a range of central government departments and agencies to transform the way the public sector operates in the UK. Established over 30 years ago and UK-based, we apply our skills in transformation, delivery, and collaboration from across the Methods Group, to create end-to-end business and technical solutions that are people-centred, safe, and designed for the future.

Our human touch sets us apart from other consultancies, system integrators and software houses - with people, technology, and data at the heart of who we are, we believe in creating value and sustainability through everything we do for our clients, staff, communities, and the planet.

We support our clients in the success of their projects while working collaboratively to share skill sets and solve problems. At Methods we have fun while working hard; we are not afraid of making mistakes and learning from them.

Predominantly focused on the public-sector, Methods is now building a significant private sector client portfolio.

Methods was acquired by the Alten Group in early 2022. Alten is a global engineering firm with approximately 57,000 employees specializing in engineering and IT services.

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Delivery Manager (3rd Line Support) to lead a high-performing, multi-disciplinary technical team. This role leads the 3rd Line support function, which is embedded within the core development team. The core service hours are 8am – 8pm Monday to Friday and 8am – 6pm Saturdays.

You will be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of complex bug fixes and problem resolution, ensuring your team is high-performing, and removing blockers to progress. You will be adept at facilitating Agile ceremonies, managing stakeholders, and communicating progress, risks, and issues. You will be accountable for the team's delivery cadence, adherence to quality standards (TDD/BDD), and the successful deployment of hotfixes into our secure, cloud-native (Azure) environment. Your key challenge is balancing the team's capacity between urgent, unplanned support work and planned feature development. 

Responsibilities

·       Lead and motivate a multi-disciplinary team of Technical Leads, Developers, QA Engineers, and Business Analysts.

·       Lead and co-ordinate the team, responding to Incidents, managing SLAs and KPIs.

·       Work in the clients ITSM toolset of choice to manage Incidents, problems and Changes

·       Manage the end-to-end delivery lifecycle, using Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) to ensure timely and high-quality releases of both features and fixes.

·       Facilitate all Agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.

·       Proactively identify and remove impediments, shield the team from external distractions, and manage risks, issues, and dependencies.

·       Build and maintain strong relationships with senior stakeholders, product managers, and the 2nd line AMS team, and Product Domain Teams ensuring clear and consistent communication.

·       Track and report on team velocity, project progress, and support metrics to leadership.

·       Ensure the team adheres to best practices for software development (TDD, BDD) and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) for both new features and hotfixes.

·       Work with the team to manage the product backlog, ensuring user stories and bug tickets are well-defined, estimated, and prioritised.

·       Lead a multi-disciplinary 3rd Line support function (Tech Leads, Developers, QA) responsible for deep technical investigation and resolution of complex production bugs.

·       Manage the triage and prioritisation of 3rd line support tickets, balancing urgent bug fixes with planned feature development.

·       Facilitate "deep dive" root cause analysis (RCA) for complex problems, ensuring fixes are robust, well-tested (TDD, BDD), and address the underlying architectural issue.

·       Oversee the hotfix and patch release process, ensuring changes are safely code-reviewed, tested, and deployed into the production AKS environment via CI/CD pipelines.

·       Liaise closely with the 2nd Line, AMS teams and Product Management to identify problem trends, communicate fixes, and drive long-term stability improvements in the product backlog.

·       Ensures total clarity of issues – both received and passed to an ultimate resolver group

·       Ensures feedback / KBAs that arise from resolution are shared and understood to reduce future incidents flowing to 3rd line.

Requirements

Essential Skills & Experience

·       Proven experience as a Delivery Manager or Scrum Master, successfully delivering complex software projects.

·       Expert knowledge of Agile (Scrum, Kanban) and Lean principles, with a track record of implementing and improving these practices.

·       Experience leading multi-disciplinary technical teams (developers, QA, BA).

·       Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to engage with both technical and non-technical audiences, including at a senior level.

·       Strong experience with Agile management tools such as Jira and Confluence or Azure DevOps.

·       Focused on enabling and empowering the team.

·       Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to manage risks and dependencies effectively.

·       Experience managing teams in a modern, cloud-native environment (preferably Azure, including AKS/Kubernetes).

·       Understanding of microservices architectures, RESTful APIs, and event-driven patterns (Event Sourcing, Pub/Sub).

·       Familiarity with modern DevOps cultures and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, Git).

·       A strong appreciation for quality, including test automation (TDD/BDD) and non-functional testing.

·       Experience working in a secure government or public sector environment, with an understanding of GDS Service Standards.

·       Proven experience managing a 3rd line support or 'dev-level' support team.

·       A strong technical background or the ability to rapidly understand complex architectures (Java microservices, Event Sourcing, CQRS, Azure, AKS).

·       Expertise in managing the balance between reactive support activities and proactive feature delivery within a single Agile team.

·       Strong leadership in problem management and coordinating complex, high-pressure technical investigations.

·       Experience in code-level debugging, log analysis, and database investigation (SQL/Postgres).

Security Clearance

Must hold or be willing and eligible to undergo Security Clearance (SC).

Desirable Skills

·       Formal Agile certification (e.g., Certified ScrumMaster, SAFe)

·       Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform)

·       Knowledge of ITIL Service Management principles

This role will require you to have or be willing to go through Security Clearance. As part of the onboarding process candidates will be asked to complete a Baseline Personnel Security Standard; details of the evidence required to apply may be found on the government website Gov.UK. If you are unable to meet this and any associated criteria, then your employment may be delayed, or rejected. Details of this will be discussed with you at interview.

Benefits

By joining us you can expect:

• Autonomy to develop and grow your skills and experience
• Be part of exciting project work that is making a difference in society
• Strong, inspiring and thought-provoking leadership
• A supportive and collaborative environment.

As well as this, we offer:

• Development access to LinkedIn Learning, a management development programme and training
• Wellness 24/7 Confidential employee assistance programme
• Social – Breakfast Tuesdays, Thirsty Thursdays and Pizza on the last Thursday of each month as well as commitment to charitable causes
• Time off 25 days a year
• Pension Salary Exchange Scheme with 4% employer contribution and 5% employee contribution
• Discretionary Company Bonus based on company and individual performance
• Life Assurance of 4 times base salary
• Private Medical Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)
• Worldwide Travel Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)