5 minutes with… Stew Livingstone
Stew is a people first delivery management leader. His career started out in Learning and Development over 15 years ago, and after transforming a traditional, non-digital team into working in an agile way, he made the move into Delivery Management 5 years ago. His mission is to enable amazing people, and believes that everyone has the capacity to be amazing at what they do, and it’s his role to enable them through great leadership, coaching, mentoring and helping to remove the things that get in the way of them doing their best. He is based in Manchester.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in May 2023 and Stew has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I spent the best part of my career in Learning and Development and project managing Learning and Development initiatives, so it was something that I fell into and I didn’t really see it officially as delivery/project management. In the later part of my career in Learning and Development I ran a Design team and I was frustrated by the process of how things got done in the team and decided to work with our Digital team at the time to transform their ways of working. The transformation saw amazing outcomes achieved which included improved team happiness, better quality of output, team development and improved our speed of delivery by 33% which was outstanding. I was the first person in a large company to transform a non-digital team to work in that way and it meant I got noticed by our Digital team who asked if I wanted to come over and work in their department, which I jumped at the chance.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
My advice would be not to get sucked into all of the Agile frameworks that are out there. They’re really useful to understand and to help you get started but as you progress you’ll realise that a round peg doesn’t fit into a square hole and you need to adapt to get the best results. Also, it’s not all about your technical knowledge, the biggest part of Delivery Management is enabling people, so focus on developing your soft skills such as developing your emotional intelligence, facilitation and coaching.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
I’ve worked on a few difficult projects in my time. One that comes to mind is when we were bringing all of our agency developed websites in-house to save on business costs and bring brand consistency across our sites. This might be controversial, but I don’t think the work itself is ever particularly difficult, when something becomes difficult it tends to be when it’s related to people. So in this case, it was managing the expectations of multiple business area marketing teams and trying to move them away from opinion based decision making to using data to drive the decisions that we made about the components we created on the site. Also trying to educate them about how we build digital products, as before they would go off to an agency, pay them a load of money and of course the agency wouldn’t say no to them, so I think it was difficult for them when we started to challenge their opinions with data and ask them to help us understand the outcomes they were trying to achieve.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
I’d split the skills needed into 4 categories:
Delivery 101:
Championing Agile and Lean Practices - being the expert that knows how to apply different practices to get the best out of the context that a team is working in and their specific problems
Planning for outcomes - helping the team plan little and often, managing uncertainty and using useful metrics to help the team continually improve
Maintaining a delivery momentum - help identify issues and unblock them so the team can deliver value
Making a process work - not just looking at the team processes but working with other areas of the business to improve processes that impacts on the team, to help improve the speed of delivery
People:
Servant Leadership - you look after the team and understand you’re there to enable them to deliver value and without them, you wouldn’t be able to delivery anything
Team dynamics and collaboration - delivery is the practice that brings everyone together and smashes siloed ways of working, so spotting opportunities for people to work together and know how to build high performing teams
Team health - monitoring how the team are feeling and helping them identify how they could improve their ways of working
Communicating between the technical and non-technical - being a translator for everyone across the organisation to understand the work that’s going on in the team, in the simplest terms and helping to demystify software development
Commerciality:
Building a profitable business - understanding how the work that teams are doing is contributing to the strategic priorities for the business and linking these, helping people in teams to find a purpose at work. Being able to challenge work that doesn’t add value to the business and ensure that the team are seen as adding value.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
A lot of the work of Delivery and Project Managers are not seen and it’s often difficult for us to prove our value. When we’re around, things should go smoothly, but when we’re not, you can tell things aren’t quite right.
I believe we’re a bit like Nanny McPhee… “When you need us but do not want us, we’ll stay, and when you want us but no longer need us, we’ll go.”
Another challenge I’m noticing is that there’s a lot of companies out there that want to go ‘Agile’ and they believe doing so is about applying some silver bullet framework like Scrum at Scale or SAFe, and the challenge here is that they don’t actually understand the outcomes they’re wanting to achieve by being more agile. I’ve seen a lot of job descriptions recently that have the right job titles but when you dig deeper, it’s clear that’s not what they’re actually looking for.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
The COVID pandemic was a difficult time for a lot of people and I would love to have been involved in creating some of the digital services in response to the pandemic. I’m motivated by a purpose and I do kick into action in a crisis, so this would have been right up my street. As much as my roles these days have been at a leadership level and less working directly with teams, I’m not afraid of rolling up my sleeve and getting stuck in to help out.
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.