It seems like new roles sprout up in the tech industry every day, and sometimes what the role entails can be quite opaque. We spoke to Liberty IT’s Barry Bresnahan about what it truly means to be a senior delivery lead.
For an industry that depends on calculating things in exact detail much of the time, tech roles themselves can be rather murky.
For example, there is heated debate about the difference between a software engineer and a software developer. Every day, a new flashy-sounding role pops up on job boards.
Yet can you say with confidence you actually understand what these roles truly entail? If you had to describe what a senior delivery lead does, could you do it?
Barry Bresnahan is a senior delivery lead at Liberty IT in Belfast. Early in his career, he travelled around the world and worked as an engineer in various countries. Upon his return, he joined Liberty IT and found that he “gravitated naturally” towards different leadership roles in the company.
“It was lovely to marry my skills with what Liberty needed and work my way through different [roles].”
This still doesn’t quite answer the all-important question of what a senior delivery lead does. As Bresnahan puts it, a senior delivery lead is responsible for the “strategic direction of their unit, a unit being a team generally consisting of between 40 and 50 people”.
He continued: “They manage relationships with key stakeholders around the globe and ultimately they’re responsible for the value their unit provides to business partners.”
“I guess, at a high level, I build, I support, I empower teams of high-performing engineers to deliver products. The tasks themselves are very varied; that’s part of the attraction to the role.”
These tasks, Bresnahan went on to explain, could be anything from short-term planning to long-term goals. One moment, he’s poring through unit metrics and finances to see if there’s anything that needs his support or attention; another moment, he’s musing with Australia-based colleagues about what’s coming down the line in the next year.
If you think this could be the kind of role you’d love, Bresnahan has simple and practical advice: “Understand the role, find out about it. Spend time with somebody doing the role; shadow them if possible. Take on some of the tasks.”
