5 minutes with… Darren McCormac
#fiveminuteswith image of Darren McCormac
Darren is a Senior Delivery Manager, working in the public and charity sectors. His focus is on building teams with a great culture as he believes that culture, rather than frameworks or process, is the key to how we get a great product.
Darren is most proud of his work at HM Passport Office, where he delivered Europe’s first fully-online application service, and at the London Borough of Hackney, where he led the AWS migration following a cyber-attack.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in April 2023 and Darren has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I sort of didn’t, I just ended up here. I was a civil servant for many years, starting as a criminal caseworker. I later moved into Private Office (Civil Service-speak for working for a Director General or Minister) as a private secretary, and then was offered a move to the Strategy & Change directorate of the Passport Office. There, my role was again as a coordinator, working with outsourced suppliers to deliver small projects. Really, this has been the common thread in my career: the person who gets stuff done through others.
After a few years in that role, I was offered an assignment as the Delivery Manager for the Online Renewals team; this was my first digital/agile project and I absolutely loved it. This experience helped me realise that I’d finally found the right career
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
You don’t need technical knowledge. You don’t need endless certifications. You don’t need to know all the answers. You almost certainly have the transferable skills to be a great DM, you just need to realise it.
One of the best DMs I ever hired had previously been a team leader in a local authority contact centre, but the empathy and thoughtfulness they displayed in their work was what I was looking for in a career-switcher. They understood the concepts of agile and had even been using some of them, but just hadn’t known it.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
Online Passport Renewals was tough for a few different reasons. The team was dysfunctionally large, 25 people, and I was incredibly green as a DM. But this dysfunctional team really supported me in learning the job and how to support and lead them. We had unpredicted (and unpredictable) user behaviour in our private beta, and we were trying to be disruptive in a risk-averse organisation that had previously had a poor reputation for managing change.
The technology was complex, as we had to connect to a legacy on-prem system that was old when it was introduced, and then we had the political element on top. We had to delay for a few months because our planned private beta launch was the day before parliament rose for the 2015 general election. This got blocked from far above, and we had to re-plan a lot of work.
But it was also a lot of fun, and I learned a LOT in that time – what to do and what NOT to do!
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
Empathy; listening; trusting your instinct. We call these “soft skills” but really they’re incredibly hard, and unlike managing a Trello board, they’re not something that can be easily learned.
I think empathy is really important, because when you see your colleagues as people first, you’ll get the best from them. They’re not machines. Listening, because it helps build trust when you properly listen, consider your response, and take action on what you hear. And trusting your instinct is usually the right thing to do.
The DM can often be the most experienced member of the team and they’ll look to you for guidance and leadership. Model these and other good behaviours and watch your team grow.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
I’ve worked exclusively in the public and charity sectors, so a lot of the challenges are probably a bit different to those faced by my counterparts in the private sector. Some are pretty universal, mostly money and bureaucracy, and the public sector is excellent at making both a challenge! In the public sector we are still a long way from funding teams rather than projects, but also it’s harder to get enough money to make real change for the public. I was at a talk earlier this year where someone compared getting adequate funding in local government to the Hunger Games, and I don’t think I can disagree.
There’s another challenge that’s smaller but harder to unpick. As digital/agile delivery becomes more common, not enough senior people in organisations understand it, and this can make the job of delivery teams harder as people have false expectations or make incorrect assumptions. We need to do more to educate stakeholders on what agile is and is not, and this is something my old colleagues in Wales at the Centre for Digital Public Services do very well. Keep an eye on them, something good is happening there.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
Not a project, but an environment – I’d have loved to have worked at GDS in the early days. They did some amazing things and it was a genuine revolution in how the Civil Service worked, and how we delivered services to the public. This was actually the topic of my (aborted) Masters more than a decade before GDS was even a thing, and it would have been amazing to be part of it.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of those people, people like Ann Kempster and Emily Webber, and I’ve learned so much from them. It’s a shame that so much of that early ethos seems to have dissipated.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.