Enterprise Practice Lead (Delivery Management) (Remote from anywhere in CO)

Enterprise Practice Lead, Delivery Management

The Colorado Governor's Office of Information Technology is in the middle of a transformation worth joining. We're building cross-functional pod teams that partner directly with agencies to design, deliver, and continuously improve services that work for Coloradans. Good government depends on technology that works. And OIT exists to make that true for every Coloradan. The State of Colorado is seeking an Enterprise Practice Lead, Delivery Management to help build the next generation of public services. We're looking for people who want to do the best work of their careers in service of the public. The Enterprise Practice Lead, Delivery Management owns how delivery is managed across OIT's pods: the standards, procurement playbooks, sprint governance frameworks, and professional community that make every Delivery Manager more capable. Where the Delivery Manager embedded in a pod runs sprint cadence, manages vendor contracts, and keeps delivery moving, the Enterprise Practice Lead builds the infrastructure that makes those things possible at scale. Guilds at OIT enable consistency, quality, and community across a federated team structure. IT Directors (ITDs) are responsible for the people management of their pod of practitioners; Enterprise Practice Leads guide and support the practitioners to deliver good work. This role requires deep fluency in both modern delivery practice and state government procurement. The guild is responsible for one of the hardest transitions in the model: from classical project management (with its Gantt charts, fixed scope, and waterfall habits) toward continuous delivery discipline. 18F's de-risking work makes this case with evidence: only 13% of large government software projects succeed under traditional approaches. Modular procurement, Statements of Objectives, time-and-materials contracting, and empowered product ownership are not just preferences. They are measurably less risky. The Enterprise Practice Lead must know that case deeply and build the playbooks, training, and community that make the transition real rather than nominal.

What you'll do:

• Define what good delivery management practice looks like at each stage of the product lifecycle: discovery, alpha, beta, live, and continuous improvement each have different governance needs, and standards should reflect that.
• Develop and maintain contract templates, SOO frameworks, sprint governance standards, and procurement playbooks aligned to EA-approved vendor and technology guardrails and Colorado acquisition law.
• Build triage frameworks for inherited waterfall contracts: how to categorize them (pre-procurement, mid-flight, stable maintenance) and what transition strategy applies to each, drawing on 18F's de-risking guidance as a reference.
• Identify patterns of delivery management weakness across the portfolio: sprint governance that is nominal rather than real, missing vendor accountability, and unchecked scope creep. Design systemic responses to each.
• Run a delivery management guild: retrospectives on procurement and delivery challenges, shared lessons from vendor management, peer critique of sprint governance approaches, and calibration sessions on what's working and what isn't.
• Develop a career pathway for delivery managers that distinguishes modern delivery competency from classical project management and creates legible growth, drawing on the GDS DDaT framework's delivery manager progression as a reference.
• Build and deliver training programs that embed modern operational standards statewide, focusing on establishing team rhythm, unblocking delivery bottlenecks, creating progress visibility, and utilizing modern procurement practices to de-risk delivery and enforce consistent quality benchmarks.
• Create and maintain shared resources that practitioners can use without starting from scratch, such as sprint governance guides, contract templates, vendor evaluation rubrics, and procurement playbooks.
• Advise ITDs on what strong delivery management practice looks like across sprint governance, vendor accountability, and procurement. Advise on how to give feedback to delivery managers whose craft spans technical, commercial, and process dimensions.
• Distinguish between a practitioner skill gap, a vendor quality problem, and a structural constraint such as inherited contracts that prevent modern delivery approaches or procurement rules that need navigation rather than override, and advise accordingly.
• Surface systemic procurement or governance patterns across pods that point to a policy gap or training need rather than individual performance.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of modern delivery management at a deep practitioner level: agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban), sprint governance, risk and dependency management, vendor accountability in continuous delivery contexts, and how delivery needs shift across the product lifecycle from discovery through live service.
• Knowledge of government procurement and contracting: Statements of Objectives versus Statements of Work, time-and-materials structures with caps, modular procurement strategy, performance-based services contracting, and how to write and manage contracts oriented toward outcomes rather than deliverables, all grounded in the 18F de-risking framework and Colorado state acquisition rules.
• Knowledge of the distinction between classical project management and modern delivery management: why the transition is hard, what habits from waterfall are most resistant to change, and how to design training and standards that address the actual gap rather than just the vocabulary.
• Knowledge of Vendor management in a government delivery context: how to hold vendor teams accountable to working software and outcomes, how to conduct meaningful contract performance reviews, and how to triage inherited fixed-scope contracts toward continuous delivery approaches, including how to categorize and sequence that transition.
• Knowledge of state budget and legislative cycles as they affect technology delivery timelines, contracting structures, and the practical constraints delivery managers navigate.
• Knowledge of career pathway design for delivery managers: how to distinguish modern delivery competency from project coordination, and what a growth path looks like inside this discipline through the lens of the GDS head of delivery management framework.
• Ability to navigate procurement complexity without slowing delivery. Find paths through Colorado acquisition rules that enable iterative contracts and real vendor accountability. Make those paths usable by every Delivery Manager through clear playbooks.
• Ability to resist the gravity of waterfall. The hardest part of this guild's job is helping practitioners unlearn habits that feel safe and familiar. Build a community where modern delivery practice is the norm rather than the exception, backed by evidence.
• Ability to hold accountability standards without micromanagement. Define what good delivery management looks like and advise ITDs on it. Do not insert the guild into pod-level delivery decisions.
• Ability to make procurement accessible. Delivery Managers shouldn't need a legal background to write a good SOO. Translate procurement complexity into playbooks practitioners can use confidently.
• Ability to distinguish processes from overhead. Some delivery governance is essential. Some are habits from a different model. Design standards that add real value and actively prune what doesn't.