About the Role
The Manager, Delivery Assurance is a senior, billable delivery role accountable for the health of BIG's engagement portfolio. The person carries live client delivery responsibility at all times. They run independent assurance across the portfolio, absorb delivery escalations, and lead recovery of at-risk engagements.
This role exists to consolidate delivery escalation and assurance work that is currently distributed across the Head of Solution Delivery, DSO leadership, and Client Partners. It is the first position of what is expected to become a small delivery assurance capability as the portfolio grows.
What You'll Do
Billable Engagement Delivery
- Lead assigned client engagements in the capacity determined by portfolio need, across engagements of varying size and platform
- Own delivery outcome, client relationship health, and engagement margin for assigned work
- Lead mobilization of new programs through the establishment window and transition cleanly to steady-state ownership
- Deliver paid delivery assessments and independent program reviews as standalone engagements
Escalation & Recovery
- Act as the defined intake point for delivery escalations across the portfolio, triaging and routing or assuming ownership as appropriate
- Assume delivery leadership of engagements entering recovery, on a defined and time-bound basis
- Diagnose root cause across delivery approach, estimation, staffing, governance, and client relationship management
- Produce and execute the recovery plan - re-baseline, revised governance, staffing change, and the client reset
- Support the Client Partner in the client-facing recovery narrative, and define exit criteria for return to steady state
Delivery Assurance
- Run independent gate reviews at defined checkpoints - mobilization, baseline, SIT entry, UAT entry, go-live readiness, hypercare exit
- Maintain a portfolio health view covering schedule, margin, scope, quality, team stability, and client sentiment
- Operate defined early-warning triggers and convene review when they fire
- Report portfolio health to the Head of Solution Delivery on a fixed cadence, independent of account-team reporting
- Ensure every significant engagement carries a named deputy and a documented continuity plan
Automation & AI Leverage
BIG expects this role to be substantially AI-enabled from day one. The assurance function is deliberately being built on the assumption that reporting, synthesis, and analysis are automated rather than manually assembled.
- Use Claude and comparable tooling to automate portfolio health reporting, status synthesis, and variance analysis
- Build reusable assets - review templates, risk checklists, estimation challenge prompts - that let assurance scale beyond one person
- Reduce the manual reporting burden on delivery managers rather than adding to it
- Demonstrate measurable time savings from automation as part of ongoing performance expectations
Delivery Excellence
- Own the delivery playbook, gate criteria, and estimation standards, and drive their adoption
- Convert recovery findings into preventive changes to standards, templates, and estimating practice
- Coach delivery managers and program managers; contribute to delivery leadership bench development
- Support pre-sales through delivery-approach review, estimation challenge, and risk identification on major pursuits
What You Bring
- 8+ years in consulting or project delivery, including program or engagement leadership
- Demonstrated turnaround of at-risk client programs, including the client-facing element
- Commercial fluency across fixed-price, T&M, and managed services constructs; ownership of engagement margin
- Credibility with client executive stakeholders; able to hold a difficult conversation without damaging the relationship
- Track record of influence without direct authority across peer delivery leaders
- Demonstrated use of AI tooling to automate delivery reporting or analysis
- Comfortable carrying a billable target and being deployed to engagements of any size
- Comfortable being unwelcome on arrival and useful on departure
- Willing to attribute failure to BIG accurately when that is the finding
- Treats no assignment as beneath the role
Nice to Have
- Delivery experience on low-code platforms or comparable enterprise platforms
- Prior formal assurance, PMO, or quality-gate ownership
- Experience in a boutique or mid-market consultancy spanning delivery, commercial, and pre-sales
