5 minutes with… Scott Drayton
Scott is a Principal Delivery Manager and has been with his current company for 18 months. Prior to this Scott was a Senior Delivery Manager with the same company. Scott is based in Somerset in the South West.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in June 2023 and Scott has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I did not actually choose a role in Delivery Management, I was asked to apply for a Scrum Master role when I was a little lost with what I wanted to do. I have a background in IT Support and sales, also briefly with Project Management. It never quite felt right managing projects in the way I had to, and this came light after speaking with a few Scrum Masters and Delivery Managers during the application process. Something about the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles seemed to just make sense. That was 8 years ago and I'm still enjoying every minute of it now!
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
This is a really tough question. I think entering this role during a predominately remote working environment is really tough. But if someone has been part of a team that is really trying to adopt agile ways of working, and has seen how these teams can deliver, be happy and have a great team ethic, then I can understand the appeal. I would advise you to accept that most problems and challenges you encounter will be people problems. Learn about listening, a lot. Learn about empathy and different coaching styles. Learn to accept that you will meet teams and organisations at different stages of their journey and you cannot simply tell them how to think. Learn that there are many ways to work with agile, do not become dogmatic with one framework.
Learn to look after yourself mentally; it can be challenging to always care about other people and want to see them succeed.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
I think the toughest project I have worked on was entering an environment that was broken at every point. Management arguing over what was important, teams being managed to deliver under pressure without any space to improvise or guidance around the goal and direction the work is going in. Relationships between team members were strained and this caused an outpour of criticism in retrospectives. The account management has been neglected and people were burnt out throughout both teams. Welcome to Delivery Management! It really tested me mentally and was definitely the toughest 7 months of my career in this role.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
I think you need to genuinely believe that people are doing the best they can. You need to realise that people are making decisions inside their current constraints and pressures and this needs to be tackled with them, not solved for them. You need to have a broad range of skills across all project management and agile practices and principles. You need to appreciate the disciplines within a team and the practices they adopt and work towards; user centred design, technical practices and understand change management. You need to respect and trust people. It's very important that you take a lot of pleasure from seeing people succeed. You need to accept that despite what you read, you are not there to coach yourself out of a job! You need to learn how to facilitate all types of conversations. You need patience and also a thick skin when handling complex and challenging environments.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
I think that the agile industry has done a great job with helping organisations understand that we need to care more about people and the outcomes great teams can produce. But, I think that agile has really struggled with helping organisations really transform the way they think and work as a system. I've seen and worked with some fantastic teams and people that get frustrated with the system around them. The structure of these businesses are making decisions based on archaic models and ways of working and this doesn't pair well with the way that small agile teams are trying to adapt and pivot to meet user needs. I think that Delivery Managers and Project Managers, particularly in digital areas, are still being presented with large plans and programmes that carry so much weight and pressure to build something without really tackling the problem…the thing should always be smaller and allow rapid learning.
I see Delivery Managers frantically trying not to manage the team and manage the work instead, but management above and around are operating with larger pressures and it's hard not to default to how they traditionally worked; command and control and huge problems that the system will not allow to be broken down.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
I've been asked this a number of times and really struggle to answer this. It's not necessarily the product or project type, it's more the team and people. Sounds a bit textbook but I have seen small great teams achieve so much when given the freedom and trust to learn and deliver based on what they find out as they move through the discovery and delivery cycles. If I could ask for a particular environment when the project resides in, it would be an empowered team, with people that are dedicated and free to tackle problems, trusted to work in the open and supported when mistakes are made. Do I think we will ever get there? It's hard and rare but when it happens, it's fantastic to be part of.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.