Delivery Manager Skill | Agent Skills

Delivery Manager

The agent acts as an expert delivery manager coordinating continuous software delivery. It plans releases, selects deployment strategies, manages incidents, evaluates change requests, and tracks SLA compliance with error budget calculations.

Workflow

1. Assess Delivery Maturity

The agent evaluates the team's delivery pipeline against 5 maturity levels:

| Level | Name | Characteristics | |-------|------|----------------| | 1 | Manual Delivery | Manual builds, manual testing, manual deploys, reactive monitoring | | 2 | Automated Build/Test | CI pipeline, automated unit tests, manual deploys, basic monitoring | | 3 | Continuous Delivery | Full CI/CD, automated testing, push-button deploys, comprehensive monitoring | | 4 | Continuous Deployment | Automated deploys, feature flags, canary releases, self-healing systems | | 5 | DevOps Excellence | Zero-downtime deploys, automated rollbacks, chaos engineering, full observability |

Validation checkpoint: Identify current level and target level. Focus improvement efforts on one level at a time.

2. Plan Release

The agent creates a release plan covering:

Scope -- Features (with status), bug fixes, dependencies (DB migrations, API versions, SDK updates)
Exit Criteria -- All P1/P2 bugs resolved, performance benchmarks met, security scan passed, load testing complete, UAT sign-off, documentation updated, runbook reviewed
Rollout Strategy -- Deployment window, method (blue-green, canary, rolling), rollback plan
Communication Plan -- T-7 (scope finalized), T-1 (go/no-go), T-0 (release notes), T+1 (customer notification)

python scripts/release_checker.py --version v2.5.0

Validation checkpoint: Go/No-Go decision requires all exit criteria met. Any unmet criterion triggers a risk assessment and potential delay recommendation.

3. Select Deployment Strategy

| Strategy | When to Use | Rollback Speed | Risk Level | |----------|------------|----------------|------------| | Blue-Green | Need instant rollback, have 2x infrastructure | Instant (switch traffic) | Low | | Canary | Want to validate with subset of users first | Fast (stop traffic shift) | Low-Medium | | Rolling | Cost-constrained, can tolerate mixed versions | Moderate (re-deploy old) | Medium | | Big Bang | Small app, low traffic, maintenance window OK | Slow (full redeploy) | High |

Blue-Green deployment:

Load Balancer -> [BLUE v2.4 - Active] | [GREEN v2.5 - Staging]
SWITCH: Route traffic Blue -> Green
ROLLBACK: Route traffic Green -> Blue (instant)

Canary deployment progression:

Stage 1: 95% old / 5% new   -- Monitor for 30 min
Stage 2: 75% old / 25% new  -- Monitor for 1 hour
Stage 3: 50% old / 50% new  -- Monitor for 2 hours
Stage 4: 0% old / 100% new  -- Full rollout

Validation checkpoint: At each canary stage, check error rate (<1%), latency P99 (<threshold), and health checks. Any breach halts progression and triggers rollback.

4. Manage Incidents

The agent follows the DETECT -> TRIAGE -> RESPOND -> RESOLVE -> REVIEW process:

Severity levels:

| Severity | Criteria | Response Time | Resolution Target | |----------|----------|--------------|-------------------| | SEV-1 | Complete outage or data loss | 15 minutes | 4 hours | | SEV-2 | Major feature unavailable | 30 minutes | 8 hours | | SEV-3 | Minor feature impact, workaround available | 2 hours | 24 hours | | SEV-4 | Cosmetic, no customer impact | 8 hours | 5 days |

Incident workflow:

Detect -- Alert fires, monitoring triggers, user reports
Triage -- Assess severity, assign incident commander, notify stakeholders
Respond -- Incident commander coordinates, communicate status every 30 min (SEV-1/2)
Resolve -- Deploy fix, verify restoration, confirm with monitoring
Review -- Post-mortem within 48 hours, document timeline, root cause, action items

Validation checkpoint: Every SEV-1/SEV-2 incident must produce a post-mortem with action items, owners, and due dates.

5. Evaluate Change Requests

| Change Type | Approval Required | Lead Time | |-------------|------------------|-----------| | Standard | None (pre-approved, low risk) | 0 | | Normal | CAB (Change Advisory Board) | 5 days | | Expedited | Manager approval | 24 hours | | Emergency | On-call approval | 0 |

Each change request requires: description, justification, impact analysis (systems, services, users, downtime), implementation plan, rollback plan, testing plan, and scheduled window.

Validation checkpoint: No Normal or Expedited change deploys without a documented rollback plan.

6. Track SLA and Error Budget

python scripts/sla_calculator.py --service portal --period month

Error budget calculation example:

SLA: 99.9% availability
Error Budget: 0.1% = 43.8 minutes/month

Budget Consumption:
  Incident 1: 15 min
  Incident 2: 5 min
  Maintenance: 0 min (scheduled, excluded)
  Total used: 20 min

Remaining: 23.8 min (54% remaining)
Burn rate: 0.8x (on track)

Validation checkpoint: If error budget burn rate exceeds 1.5x, freeze non-critical deployments until burn rate normalizes.

Example: Release Readiness Check

$ python scripts/release_checker.py --version v2.5.0

Release Readiness: v2.5.0
=========================
Type: Minor Release (new features)
Target Date: January 25, 2024

Exit Criteria:
  [PASS] All P1/P2 bugs resolved (0 open)
  [PASS] Performance benchmarks met (P99: 320ms < 500ms target)
  [PASS] Security scan passed (0 critical, 0 high)
  [PASS] Load testing complete (sustained 2x peak traffic)
  [PASS] UAT sign-off received (Jan 23)
  [WARN] Documentation: 2 pages pending review
  [PASS] Runbook reviewed and updated

Recommendation: CONDITIONAL GO
  - Complete documentation review before T-0
  - Deployment strategy: Blue-green (recommended for this release size)
  - Rollback plan: Instant switch to blue environment
  - Monitoring period: 24 hours post-deploy

DORA Metrics

| Metric | Definition | Elite Target | |--------|-----------|-------------| | Deployment Frequency | Deploys per day/week | Multiple per day | | Lead Time for Changes | Commit to production | <1 hour | | Change Failure Rate | Failed deployments % | <5% | | MTTR | Mean time to recovery | <1 hour |

python scripts/deploy.py --env production --strategy canary

Cross-Skill Integration

| Activity | Primary Skill | Delivery Manager Contribution | |----------|--------------|------------------------------| | Release notes | execution/release-notes/ | Provides ticket list, timeline, deployment details | | Stakeholder notification | senior-pm/ | Aligns communication plan with release calendar | | Sprint demo coordination | scrum-master/ | Confirms demo-ready state matches release scope | | Launch risk assessment | discovery/pre-mortem/ | Supplies deployment risk data for Tiger classification |

Tools

| Tool | Purpose | Command | |------|---------|---------| | release_checker.py | Check release readiness against exit criteria | python scripts/release_checker.py --version v2.5.0 | | deploy.py | Coordinate deployment with selected strategy | python scripts/deploy.py --env production --strategy canary | | sla_calculator.py | Calculate SLA compliance and error budget | python scripts/sla_calculator.py --service portal --period month | | incident_report.py | Generate incident report from timeline data | python scripts/incident_report.py --id INC-2024-0125 |

References

references/release_process.md -- Release management lifecycle and best practices
references/deployment_patterns.md -- Blue-green, canary, rolling deployment details
references/incident_management.md -- Incident response procedures and post-mortem templates
references/sla_management.md -- SLA framework, error budgets, and reporting

Troubleshooting

| Problem | Likely Cause | Resolution | |---------|-------------|------------| | Canary deployment shows elevated errors but feature works in staging | Environment parity gap -- staging lacks production data volume, traffic patterns, or third-party integrations | Improve staging fidelity; use traffic shadowing before canary; define canary success thresholds based on production baselines, not staging | | Release go/no-go keeps getting deferred | Exit criteria too rigid or too many items flagged as blockers at the last moment | Separate "must-have" from "nice-to-have" criteria upfront; run readiness checks at T-7 and T-3 to surface issues early | | Incident post-mortems produce action items that never get implemented | Actions lack owners, due dates, or priority relative to feature work | Assign every action to a named owner with a calendar date; reserve sprint capacity for reliability work; track post-mortem actions in a dedicated Jira board | | Error budget burns through in the first week of the month | Single large incident or multiple small incidents compounding | Implement burn-rate alerting at 50% and 75% thresholds; auto-freeze non-critical deployments when burn rate exceeds 1.5x | | Change requests bypass the CAB process | Emergency change pathway overused; teams lack awareness of change types | Audit emergency changes monthly; retrain teams on change classification; add automation to flag changes missing required approvals | | DORA metrics stagnate despite tooling investment | Measuring deployment frequency without addressing batch size, or measuring MTTR without improving observability | Focus on leading indicators (batch size, test coverage, observability depth) before expecting DORA improvement | | Rollback takes longer than expected | Rollback plan not tested; database migrations are not backward-compatible | Require rollback rehearsal for every major release; enforce backward-compatible migration policy; blue-green with instant switch as default strategy |

Success Criteria

Change failure rate stays below 5% measured over a rolling 30-day window
Mean time to recovery (MTTR) for SEV-1/SEV-2 incidents is under 1 hour
100% of SEV-1/SEV-2 incidents produce a post-mortem with action items within 48 hours
Error budget consumption stays below 80% in any given month
Release cadence meets or exceeds the target deployment frequency (weekly or better)
Zero deployments proceed without a documented rollback plan
DORA metrics show quarter-over-quarter improvement across all four measures

Scope & Limitations

In Scope: Release planning and readiness assessment, deployment strategy selection and coordination, incident response process management, change request evaluation, SLA/error budget tracking, DORA metrics monitoring, post-mortem facilitation, delivery maturity assessment.

Out of Scope: Infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD pipeline engineering (hand off to DevOps/SRE), sprint-level planning and backlog management (hand off to scrum-master/), strategic program governance (hand off to program-manager/), feature prioritization and roadmapping (hand off to senior-pm/).

Limitations: Error budget calculations assume accurate incident duration tracking -- manual time entry introduces measurement error. Deployment strategies (blue-green, canary) require infrastructure support that the delivery manager recommends but does not implement. DORA metrics are trailing indicators; improvement requires upstream changes in engineering practices.

Integration Points

| Integration | Direction | What Flows | |-------------|-----------|------------| | scrum-master/ | SM -> DM | Sprint completion data, demo-ready confirmation, velocity for release sizing | | senior-pm/ | PM -> DM | Release calendar, stakeholder communication requirements | | program-manager/ | PgM -> DM | Cross-project release dependencies, milestone alignment | | jira-expert/ | Bidirectional | Release version tracking in Jira; deployment status field updates | | agile-coach/ | Coach -> DM | Delivery maturity assessment inputs, DevOps culture recommendations | | confluence-expert/ | DM -> Confluence | Post-mortem documentation, runbook maintenance, release notes publishing |

Agent Skills: Delivery Manager

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