Growing a Thriving Delivery Lead Profession within the JohnLewis Partnership

1. About The Partnership

Not many people would think that the John Lewis Partnership is at the leading edge of software delivery, however John lewis was one of the first organisations in the UK to adopt the role of delivery lead when it started to emerge and take shape around 6 years ago.

The evolution in our delivery engine was driven by the Partnership’s continuing obsession with delighting its customers and responding to the velocity of changing customer demand.

OUR PURPOSE AND PRINCIPLES

“Our happier business starts with happier Partners, enjoying worthwhile and satisfying work in a supportive environment we all help to create”

Coupled with the Partnership core values revolving around Happier People, Happier Customers and a Happier World, we wanted to invest in our Partners so that they thrive and and continue to enjoy coming into work every day.

To address both the purpose and the changing needs of our customers, it was clear that we needed new ways of doing things. Two new roles to support our new ways of working were created: “Product Engineer” and “Delivery Lead”. The new roles were developed in line with emerging industry norms in the space, typically led by start-ups and technology led companies such as Apple, Google, Spotify and others.

2. Creating the new Delivery Lead Profession

We were excited to have the opportunity to create a new Delivery Lead Profession. Our vision was to build a vibrant community of like minded professionals that really understood delivering in an agile way. We wanted to start with a clean slate and build a profession for the people by the people.

Creating the delivery lead Profession presented a great opportunity for the Waitrose and John Lewis Delivery Leads to become one entity for the first time maximising on the great knowledge and skills already within the group. The vision of creating a highly respected and recognised agile community of practice was at our fingertips.

3. The shift in action

Delivery leads in the Partnership came from a mixture of backgrounds including project management, agile delivery, engineering and analysis. Creating the profession enabled us to really define what the role is and the value it offers in primarily a digital first organisation. It was important for us to build on the previous successes and adapt where the transition challenges offered some learning.

Recognising that the role of Delivery Lead in teams was pivotal to great delivery, we wanted to redefine the set of skills that made this role different to its predecessors and focus on the strengths that great delivery teams required to compliment engineering and product knowledge. We also wanted to re-establish the credibility of the role and to raise the bar for what constitutes great delivery leadership and become a destination where people want to work.

Developing at pace, releasing frequently and enabling a devops mentality has been at the forefront of our digital transformation. The delivery lead’s role is pivotal to bringing the team together, co-creating, unblocking and getting the best out of team performance in all circumstances — a necessity that has been even more critical throughout the pandemic as more and more people shifted to remote and distributed working and on to online purchasing in both grocery and general merchandising.

A big part in the shift was the emphasis on “Demand and Control” is dead. Teams were encouraged to move away from traditional project management and adopt a much more agile mindset. Delivery Leads were coached to embrace change and lead product teams to be empowered to make autonomous decisions. This had a positive impact on culture where collaboration, openness and trust became core to our values.

Delivery Lead Profession Ethos Diagram

We wanted to set an example as we built the profession so we decided to role model best practice of great delivery leadership. We took an agile approach which included applying agile practices and principles from the outset. We ran workshops to listen to our Delivery Leads using retrospective techniques. We used the input and feedback to create our backlog for establishing the profession. We refined and categorised our initiatives into key areas of focus eg: People and development, connectedness and community. We prioritised based on our highest needs. Our biggest step was recreating what defines us as Great Delivery Leads. Our new capabilities set was born.

4. What Makes a Great Delivery Lead at John Lewis

“Simply being good was not enough. Our Delivery Leads wanted to strive for Great!” Partner Delivery Leads

We organised our skill sets into 3 categories of capabilities:

• Personal: focusing on mindset, growth, visible and inspiring leadership, emotional intelligence, participatory decision making and problem solving, collaboration across boundaries and continuous personal development
• Professional: Focusing on agile practice, agile coaching, optimising flows, architecture and technical appreciation, operability and telemetry of services
• Organisational capabilities: Focusing on domain knowledge, being agents of change, supplier relationships and assurance, financial and commercial acumen.

We leveraged the Partnership framework for goal setting and appraisals and adopted the agile mindset for how these would be set, captured and measured.

This was really welcomed by the Delivery Lead community to give structure to the role to enable our Partners to assess how they felt their skills stacked up and to identify areas of focus for their continuous professional development.

5. How it’s a great place to be!

Today our focus continues to be on people first. Our priority is to keep learning alive. We harbour the power of building a strong community of like minded professionals.

We are enriched by a thriving community environment powered by Partners and Consultants. Delivery Leads run sessions such as the ‘Hive mind’ where DLs meet to tackle common challenges and offer each other support, Lunch and Learn sessions to explore more in detail learning and we also encourage attendance at external meetups.

We continue to invest in Partner development where we have access to agile coaches, and leadership development through various online learning platforms and bespoke training. We are keen to develop our Partners through interesting and engaging assignments and are able to offer a wide range of opportunities across both of our Brands.

As we expand, we continue to recruit and it’s always great to bring in new Delivery Lead talent and we are always on the lookout for more! If you are interested in learning more about us and the opportunities we have, please follow our channels & hashtags!

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