Olive Jar Digital
Head of Delivery
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Head of Delivery
Location: Hybrid – 3 days in the office, 2 days remote
Salary: Up to £90k Depending on experience
Employment Type: Perm
As Head of Delivery, you will lead delivery across the agency, shaping a mature, transparent and quality-assured delivery practice for digital public services. You will be accountable for delivery quality across our portfolio, ensuring multidisciplinary teams have the clarity, governance, coaching and support they need to deliver excellent outcomes for users, clients and the agency.
You will be the agency’s senior champion for practise delivery: advocating for informed trade-offs, protecting delivery quality, supporting commercial decision-making alongside Principal Account Managers, and coaching clients on practical agile digital delivery practice - framing delivery requirements with clarity, enabling timely decision-making, and supporting collaborative ways of working.
Key Responsibilities
- Agency-wide delivery leadership: Lead delivery across the agency, setting expectations for how teams plan, manage, assure and improve delivery. Create the conditions for teams to work with pace, discipline, transparency and psychological safety.
- Delivery quality and informed trade-offs: Act as the senior advocate for delivery quality, helping teams and clients make intentional trade-offs between time, cost, scope, risk and quality without losing sight of user outcomes or service standards.
- Client escalation and delivery risk: Work directly with clients as the senior escalation point for delivery risk, underperformance, blockers and dissatisfaction. Coach clients on the behaviours that enable successful delivery, including clear ownership, timely decisions, prioritisation and evidence-led planning.
- Delivery governance and assurance: Own the agency’s delivery controls, including RAID management, assurance reviews, delivery health checks and dependency management. Codify practical templates, governance rhythms, quality gates and internal QA processes that help teams spot issues early and intervene effectively.
- GDS and Government Service Standard leadership: Guide teams and clients through Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live delivery, ensuring services are shaped around the Government Service Standard and prepared effectively for CDDO/GDS service assessments.
- Practice leadership and capability uplift: Define delivery standards, competency frameworks, communities of practice and coaching models. Build a delivery culture that is collaborative, transparent, quality-assured and focused on helping clients reach clarity faster.
- Portfolio intervention and recovery: Intervene in struggling projects, support recovery planning and help teams reset delivery approach, ways of working, governance and stakeholder alignment where needed.
- Commercial collaboration: Work closely with Account Managers, who own the overall client relationship and commercials, to ensure commercial decisions are informed by delivery reality, delivery risk and the impact on quality and outcomes.
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About You
You are an experienced delivery leader from a Delivery Management or Product background. You have led teams through complex public-sector digital work and know how to turn ambiguity into clear priorities, workable backlogs, credible delivery plans and evidence-led decisions.
You bring credible technical literacy. You may not be writing code, but you can hold confident conversations with technical architects, engineers and senior technology stakeholders. You understand the principles of modern digital technology architecture, delivery tooling and the constraints that come with transforming services in complex or legacy environments.
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You are able to confidently work with senior client stakeholders to communicate technical considerations and decisions in a non-tech jargon-free way. You have direct experience preparing teams for GDS/CDDO service assessments and understand how to embed the Government Service Standard into day-to-day delivery, not treat it as a final-stage checklist.
Success Measures
- Delivery performance improves across the portfolio, with clearer plans, healthier delivery controls and earlier intervention on risk.
- Clients experience greater confidence in delivery, clearer decision-making and better escalation support when risks or trade-offs arise.
- Teams demonstrate stronger delivery discipline, transparency, collaboration and psychological safety.
- The agency’s delivery capability matures through consistent standards, reusable templates, coaching, QA governance and active communities of practice.
- Services are better prepared for Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live assurance, with Government Service Standard expectations embedded throughout delivery.
Why Join Olive Jar Digital?
At Olive Jar Digital, we pride ourselves on building a culture where talented people can do their best work. We collaborate openly, value new ideas, and empower our teams to make a genuine impact.
You'll join a growing consultancy delivering meaningful digital transformation projects across the public sector while working alongside experienced digital specialists who are passionate about creating services that make a difference.
If you're an experienced consultancy professional who understands how to successfully manage public sector contracts, build lasting client relationships, and drive commercial success, we'd love to hear from you.
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