Delivery Manager (Release Management Focus)

Position Overview

The Delivery Manager owns end-to-end delivery of IT projects and product releases — from release planning through production cutover and post-release stabilization. This role is accountable for release quality, predictability, and cadence: ensuring every change reaching production is planned, validated, approved, communicated, and reversible. The Delivery Manager leads cross-functional delivery teams and vendors, and serves as the point of accountability for delivery commitments to business stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Release Management (Primary)

• Own the release calendar and release train across products and environments; define and enforce release cadence, code-freeze windows, and cut-off criteria

• Lead release planning: scope lock, dependency mapping across teams and vendors, and release readiness assessments

• Chair Go/No-Go and Change Advisory Board (CAB) reviews; obtain and document release approvals from business, QA, security, and operations

• Plan and execute production cutovers — deployment runbooks, cutover schedules, rollback/back-out plans, and contingency triggers

• Govern environment promotion (DEV → SIT → UAT → STG → PROD): control environment bookings, data refreshes, and configuration/version drift

• Own release documentation: release notes, deployment plans, change requests, versioning scheme, and release sign-off records

• Coordinate post-release validation, smoke testing, and hypercare; drive major-incident triage, the hotfix/emergency-change process, and problem-management follow-through when a release destabilizes production

• Track and improve release health metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, MTTR, rollback rate, and defect leakage to production

• Drive continuous improvement of the release process: release retrospectives, CI/CD pipeline maturity, automated quality gating, and reduction of manual deployment steps

Project & Program Delivery

• Own delivery of multiple concurrent IT projects from initiation through closure — scope, schedule, quality, and delivery commitments

• Coordinate cross-functional resources across development, QA, infrastructure, security, and vendor teams

• Manage milestones, inter-team dependencies, and critical path; re-plan proactively when dependencies slip

• Own the RAID log; escalate risks and blockers to senior leadership with quantified impact and recommended mitigation

SDLC & Quality Governance

• Define and enforce phase entry/exit criteria across the SDLC — requirements sign-off, design review, code complete, SIT/UAT exit, and release readiness

• Ensure end-to-end traceability from requirement → design → test case → defect → release, so every production change maps to an approved requirement

• Partner with QA to set the test strategy per release (unit, integration, SIT, regression, UAT, performance, security) and judge readiness from defect severity, aging, and trend data

• Assess the delivery impact of mid-cycle requirement changes (re-estimation, regression scope, re-test effort) before accepting them into a release

• Diagnose where in the lifecycle quality or schedule problems originate (requirements churn, design gaps, defect leakage, rework) and drive shift-left fixes

Operational Delivery & Service Quality

• Monitor service SLA compliance and the operational readiness of each release

• Ensure sprint and iteration output aligns to the release plan and release cut-off dates

• Ensure operational handover to support teams: runbooks, monitoring, alerting, and known-issue lists delivered with every release

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Act as the primary delivery contact for business stakeholders; own release communications, downtime notices, and status reporting

• Translate technical deliverables and release impact into business language for executive audiences

• Manage expectations on scope-versus-date trade-offs with transparent, evidence-based reporting

• Hold vendors and system integrators to release-readiness standards and contractual SLAs; track delivery budget utilization and flag variances early

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 7+ years in IT delivery management, technical program management, or release management, including direct ownership of production releases

• Proven track record running a regular release cadence for enterprise or large-scale systems, including major cutovers and rollback events

• Experience delivering projects spanning multiple technical disciplines (applications, infrastructure, integration, security)

• Experience leading delivery teams and managing external vendors or system integrators

Technical Knowledge

• Strong command of release and change management practice — release planning, change control, CAB, cutover and rollback strategy, hypercare

• Deep, hands-on understanding of the full SDLC — requirements, design, build, test, release, and operate — including phase gates, test levels, defect lifecycle, and requirement-to-release traceability; able to explain how release governance differs across Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, hybrid, and DevOps delivery

• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, branching and versioning strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based, semantic versioning), deployment patterns (blue-green, canary, rolling), and feature flags

• Familiarity with common technology stacks, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), and enterprise architecture

• Solid ITIL grounding — change, incident, problem, and configuration management

• Proficiency with delivery and release tooling (JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow, MS Project, Git-based pipelines, release dashboards)

Core Competencies

• Disciplined and detail-driven — comfortable enforcing freeze windows, entry/exit criteria, and sign-off gates under schedule pressure

• Calm and decisive under production pressure; sound judgment on go/no-go and rollback calls

• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage competing priorities across parallel releases

• Analytical mindset — uses delivery and release metrics to drive decisions and process improvement

• Excellent presentation skills; distills complex technical and business information into clear, actionable insight for executive audiences

• Effective communicator across technical teams, business leadership, and vendors

• Problem-solving orientation with a bias toward action and resolution

Preferred Qualifications

• PMP, PRINCE2, Agile/Scrum, or ITIL certification (ITIL Change/Release module especially valued)

• Hands-on experience implementing or maturing a release governance framework from scratch

• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) with audit-traceable change control

• Background in software development, QA, or IT operations before moving into delivery management

• Exposure to enterprise transformation initiatives, large-scale system implementations, or legacy-to-cloud migrations