Senior Delivery Manager (Remote from anywhere in Colorado)

Senior Delivery Manager

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 a Senior Delivery Manager 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 Senior Delivery Manager governs a product toward continuous outcomes, ensuring that work flows effectively and delivery keeps moving. While the Senior Product Manager decides what gets built, this position is responsible for how the team delivers. This role is responsible for maintaining delivery momentum in the face of potential ambiguity and organizational friction, moving beyond simple status reporting to active blocker removal and vendor accountability.

What you'll do:

• Establish a team tempo that is both productive and sustainable, running sprint planning, standups, reviews, and retrospectives with purpose.
• Create boards and dashboards to track workflow and progress without bureaucratic overhead.
• Actively remove blockers by navigating organizational, contractual, and technical obstacles; provide recommendations for solving issues in addition to documenting them.
• Track and communicate dependencies across teams, vendors, and agency stakeholders.
• Identify delivery risks and external dependencies early enough to act on them.
• Structure procurements for continuous delivery using Statements of Objectives (SOOs), Time & Materials with caps, and evaluation criteria focused on working software.
• Manage 3 to 5 active vendor contracts simultaneously, tracking performance and holding vendor teams accountable to outcomes rather than paperwork compliance.
• Triage inherited waterfall contracts and apply transition strategies toward continuous delivery approaches.
• Adapt cadence and approach across the service life cycle, from discovery and alpha to live service and continuous improvement.
• Regularly review, identify, and simplify processes that are no longer serving the team.
• Translate delivery status into meaningful language for OIT and agency leadership, framed around outcomes rather than activity.
• Regularly review operations to recognize when delivery capacity is exceeded and communicate clearly to the pod leader.
• Conduct meaningful contract performance reviews oriented toward outcomes, not paperwork compliance
• Evaluate expiring contracts for renewal, restructure, or transition to a different delivery approach; collaborate with the procurement team to execute the appropriate path without lapse in service.
• Manage the transition to live service as a delivery milestone, ensuring the pod maintains continuity of ownership through go-live and into ongoing improvement rather than treating launch as a handoff or project closeout.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of product and service life cycle management in regards to evolving team needs and cadence shift across discovery, alpha, beta, live, and ongoing improvement phases.
• Knowledge of agile delivery frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and the tooling that enables teams to work in sprint cycles
• Knowledge of State budget and legislative cycles as they affect technology delivery timelines.
• Knowledge of modern procurement practices that de-risk delivery and enable outcome-oriented contracts
• Ability to communicate effectively between technical and non-technical stakeholders without flattening complexity.
• Ability to guide teams toward the process that fits the work rather than enforcing a methodology for its own sake.
• Ability to adapt cadence and approach across the life cycle, recognizing that discovery phases look different from live service phases.
• Ability to balance planning and adaptability by producing enough structure to make work legible and manageable without locking into plans that can't respond to reality.
• Ability to surface delivery health honestly, including when things are not going well, before problems escalate.
• Ability to identify when a process is serving the team and when it has become overhead, taking action to simplify.
• Ability to resist organizational gravity toward Gantt charts and waterfall habits.
• Ability to structure and run sprint cadences, backlogs, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Ability to write and manage Statements of Objectives rather than Statements of Work, structure time-and-materials contracts with caps, and use modular procurement efficiently in a government procurement environment.
• Ability to triage and transition inherited fixed-scope contracts toward continuous delivery approaches.
• Ability to identify blockers, external dependencies, and delivery risks early enough to act on them.

Minimum Qualifications, Substitutions, Conditions of Employment & Appeal Rights

A wide salary range is posted for this position and any job offer is based upon a salary analysis to comply with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. The salary analysis considers relevant experience, education, certifications, and state seniority as compared to others doing substantially similar work. While all offers are compliant with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, there is no guarantee an offer will be at the top of the posted range based on the salary analysis. This is a skills-based job announcement. The required minimum qualifications and/or education (if substituting for the proven experience, knowledge, and skills), are as follows:

• A minimum of five (5) years of experience in modern technology delivery models, which includes working in or leading cross-functional teams using iterative, user-centered methods
• A track record of working across disciplines design, engineering, policy, or operations to ship things that work for real people.

Substitutions:

• Additional appropriate education will substitute for the required experience on a year-for-year basis, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.
• Training or Certification related to the work assigned to the position will be assigned credit towards substitution for experience and/or education, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.
• If the minimum qualifications include a degree requirement, additional appropriate paid or unpaid experience will substitute for the required education on a year-for-year basis.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Relevant certifications such as Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Institute Product Management, or Professional Product Manager (PPM).
• Experience working within a digital service agency or a government-adjacent technology firm, successfully translating mission-driven policy goals into actionable product backlogs.
• Experience in modern procurement practices is highly desirable, with the ability to structure vendor requirements in a way that remains outcome-oriented and agile rather than locking the state into rigid, fixed-scope contracts.
• Background in User-Centered Design (UCD).

Conditions of Employment:

OIT employees must comply with any screening procedures in place at state agency locations where they might perform work. A pre-employment background check will be conducted as part of the selection process. Post-employment background checks will be required for specific agencies as business needs dictate, which may include a polygraph exam, fingerprint-based criminal history search, reference checks, and a drug test.

This position may require travel within the specified geographic area, and to locations across the state as needed.