Director of IT Delivery in Des Moines, Iowa at Landus Cooperative

About the Role

The Director of IT Delivery is the primary business-facing leadership role within IT — responsible for translating the priorities of Agronomy, Grain, and Back Office Operations into a funded, sequenced, and realistic IT delivery portfolio. This role owns what gets prioritized, while Director of Technology owns how well the organization can deliver it — the two roles are intentionally separated so neither business urgency nor technical capacity gets steamrolled by the other.

What will you do?

• Own the IT delivery portfolio and roadmap across all business units, ensuring priorities reflect actual business need rather than whoever escalated loudest.

• Serve as the primary point of business engagement for IT — the person each business unit goes to when they need something funded, sequenced, or clarified.

• Translate level of effort into business terms and vice versa — able to look at a piece of IT work and communicate realistic timeline, cost, and tradeoffs to a non-technical business stakeholder, and translate a business ask back into scoped, sequenced technical work.

• Own delivery tracking and portfolio visibility in Wrike — maintaining the roadmap, project status, and resourcing views that both business stakeholders and IT leadership rely on for decision-making.

• Act as Scrum Master for IT delivery initiatives — running sprint ceremonies (planning, stand-ups, retros) where applicable, removing blockers, and keeping delivery teams and Delivery Leads working against a shared, visible cadence rather than ad hoc requests.

• Own change management and UAT coordination for delivery initiatives — ensuring changes hitting production are reviewed, tested, and signed off with clear acceptance criteria before go-live.

• Manage risk across the delivery portfolio — identifying, tracking, and mitigating risk on in-flight initiatives, and escalating proactively rather than letting risk surface at delivery.

• Own budget and resourcing for the delivery function — including any third-party vendors or consultants engaged to support delivery work.

• Lead and coach the Delivery Leads (Agronomy, Grain, Back Office Ops), holding them accountable for business outcomes, not just completed tickets — even though they don't own technical staff directly. Build delivery-team skill and capacity over time, not just manage day-to-day output.

• Partner directly with Director of Technology on a standing, recurring basis to weigh capacity and feasibility before committing work to the roadmap — prioritization decisions are made with technical reality in view, not in isolation.

• Coordinate with Lead Automation Engineer on location-level and automation-related priorities specifically, given that role's dual scope as both a working manager and a prioritization partner.

• Work with Manager, Business Systems & AI / Business Systems Analyst to ensure delivery priorities reflect what AGRIS and other core systems can actually support — preventing commitments that outpace system capability.

• Escalate and resolve prioritization conflicts between business units competing for the same shared technical resources.

• Report portfolio health and delivery risk to the VP of IT as part of overall IT governance.

Publish an organization-wide monthly update summarizing what IT is working on and has accomplished — giving business stakeholders outside IT regular, digestible visibility into delivery progress without requiring them to track the roadmap directly.

Requirements of Role:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, or a related field; Master's or MBA a plus.

• 5+ years of experience leading IT delivery, PMO, or business-relationship-management functions, ideally in a mid-size organization (ag, co-op, manufacturing, or similarly operationally complex industries are a strong fit).

• Working proficiency with Wrike or a comparable project/portfolio management tool, with real experience using it to drive prioritization conversations, not just log status.

• Scrum Master experience or certification (CSM or equivalent) required; PMP or ITIL certification preferred.

• Demonstrated ability to translate technical level-of-effort into business-understandable terms, and business urgency into realistically scoped technical asks — this is arguably the single most important skill for the role.

• Experience managing vendor and third-party relationships in a delivery context.

• Comfortable operating as a translator between business stakeholders and technical teams without owning the technical work itself.

• ERP-driven environment experience is a strong plus — familiarity with how a core system like AGRIS shapes what's actually deliverable.

• Track record of holding indirect reports (people who don't report to you on paper) accountable through influence rather than authority.

Core Value expectations:

· Thrive Together

· Integrity in Action

· Grow Forward

Physical Demands: The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this Job, the employee is regularly required to talk or listen. The employee is frequently required to stand; use hands to finger, handle, or feel and reach with hands and arms when using equipment. The employee is occasionally required to walk; sit; climb or balance; stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl and taste or smell. The employee must frequently lift and/or move up to 50 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, peripheral vision, and depth perception.