Senior Delivery Lead (Remote)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co; Portsmouth (NH); Remote; USD 88,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote position

Travel 10%

Job summary

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. is seeking a Senior Delivery Lead to facilitate agile delivery, coordinate sprint and release planning, and mature agile practices across teams.

The role requires collaboration with development, technical leadership, and business leadership to forecast delivery and manage dependencies. The successful candidate will drive process improvements, maintain transparent delivery metrics, and enable cross-functional teams to deliver incremental value.

Qualifications

• BS/BA in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Minimum 6 years of experience.
• Technical background, experience with software development.
• Proficient use of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Jira and Smartsheet (preferred)
• Highly organized

Responsibilities

• Facilitates sprint & release planning; coordinates with development teams and leadership.
• Nurtures a culture of trust, transparency and accountability with clear processes.
• Leads by example and addresses pain points for internal stakeholders.
• Proposes and implements process improvements and operational frameworks.
• Creates and manages information radiators to surface planned work and progress.
• Collaborates with shared services to create statements of work and manage dependencies.

Skills

Agile methodologies

Stakeholder management

Cross-functional collaboration

Jira

Smartsheet

Excel

Education

BS/BA in Computer Science or related discipline

Tools

Jira

Smartsheet

Excel

Job description

The Sr Delivery Lead is a critical member of the agile team and is responsible for facilitating the continuous delivery of value to Heinemann customers. This position is highly collaborative and requires coordination with development teams, technical leadership and business leadership. Primary responsibilities include sprint & release planning; maturing the team’s agile practices; managing inter-team dependencies and communicating progress to all stakeholders.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Nurtures a culture of trust, transparency and accountability within and across teams through clear, repeatable, and measurable processes.
• Serves all members of the teams responsible for developing and delivering our products by:
  • Responding to internal and external inquiries in a timely fashion
  • Proposing and implementing process improvements
  • Anticipating and removing blockers
  • Coordinating communication within and across groups
  • Understanding commitments, targets, scope, investment, milestones, velocity, and capacity to forecast delivery timelines
  • Facilitating, documenting and communicating risk, trade‑off, and mitigation discussions at the appropriate junctures to inform and enable decision owners
  • Ensuring a comprehensive view of the team's work is documented and tracked
• Leads by example and serves as the owner of process by actively seeking opportunities to address pain points for internal stakeholders. This includes understanding the problem space, designing a solution, and prioritizing the work based on the value, impact, and effort.
• Proposes and implements process improvements and operational frameworks that enable the scrum team to reach their potential while satisfying business obligations and supporting organizational goals.
• Creates and manages information radiators that surface planned work, communicate progress, and support internal stakeholder needs.
• Collaborates with shared services and other internal teams to create statements of work, provide inputs to labor plans and budget reports, and manage vendors and other inter‑team dependencies.

Shared Accountabilities:

• Decompose current and future work to the appropriate level of detail to establish shared understanding, support cross‑functional planning requirements, and remain flexible to changing market needs.
• Adopt Agile methodologies and best practices, regularly reviewing sprint outcomes to seek opportunities for improvement and inform future planning.
• Build a culture of trust and accountability by regularly completing sprint commitments and delivering incremental value to customers.
• Make connections across product, process, and delivery to create opportunities for collaboration in service of a consistent, seamless end user experience.
• Maintain focus on customer needs by incorporating user testing and feedback throughout the product development process.
• Observe, orient, decide, and act. Aggregate and learn from a variety of data to continuously improve outcomes for the business and our customers.
• Clearly define deliverables to set expectations, plan work, and allocate budget and resources within and across teams.
• Assess and communicate the value of our work to our customers.
• Maintain a transparent delivery process to ensure stakeholders can monitor progress.

Leadership

• Prioritize what matters for student outcomes and continually keep the team focused on the goals
• Demonstrate transformative leadership skills to build great teams and foster a healthy, high‑performing culture of innovation, collaboration, and impact
• Build strong relationships with multiple stakeholders both within and across functions inside and outside the organization including suppliers, partners and customers
• Demonstrate strategic conceptual thinking coupled with a commercial and operational execution‑oriented mindset
• Strong ability and experience in implementing policies, controls and procedures
• Measure what we manage –create a data‑disciplined organization
• Approach problems from a systems perspective, defining connections, linkages, and interdependencies
• Eliminate obstacles that affect organizational performance
• Build a culture of collaboration and teamwork across organizational boundaries
• Create a culture with systems and processes that enable cross‑functional teamwork
• Show consistency between words and actions, gaining people’s trust and respect

Requirements:

• BS/BA in Computer Science or a related discipline
• Minimum 6 years of experience
• Technical background, experience with software development
• Proficient use of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Jira and Smartsheet (preferred)
• Highly organized

Physical Requirements

• This position is a remote position.
• Minimal travel - approximately 10%
• Might be in a stationary position for a considerable time (sitting and/or standing).
• Must be able to collaborate with colleagues via face to face, conference calls, and online meetings.

Benefits and Salary Range

• Salary Range - $88,000 - $110,000 annually

For over forty years Heinemann has been a publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, kindergarten through college. We strive to give voice to those who share our respect for the professionalism and compassion of teachers and who support teachers’ efforts to help children become literate, empathetic, knowledgeable citizens.

Commitment to Inclusion:

We aim to create and cultivate an employee community, company culture, and business strategy that reflects the diverse demographics and perspectives of our customers and holds diversity, equity, and inclusion as integral to our core value of justice that is evident in our actions, our brand, and our products. We use our influence to reduce the impact of racism and build HMH as a model antiracist community.

Our employee's commitment to this work is demonstrated through their involvement in our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that are centered around particular shared interests, characteristics and/or life experiences. ERGs provide support, enhance career development, contribute to personal development, and promote inclusion in the work environment.

ABOUT US: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (NASDAQ:HMHC) is a global learning company dedicated to changing people's lives by fostering passionate, curious learners. As a leading provider of pre-K-12 education content, services, and cutting-edge technology solutions across a variety of media, HMH enables learning in a changing landscape. HMH is uniquely positioned to create engaging and effective educational content and experiences from early childhood to beyond the classroom. HMH serves more than 50 million students in over 150 countries worldwide, while its award‑winning children's books, novels, non-fiction, and reference titles are enjoyed by readers throughout the world.

For more information, visit http://careers.hmhco.com

PLEASE NOTE: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an equal employment opportunity employer and participates in E-Verify. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of gender, race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, or other protected group status.

Nearest Major Market: Portsmouth

Nearest Secondary Market: Boston

Job Segment: Book Publishing, Media Publishing, Publishing, Education