About

Swimmer, 90s-Peugeot cyclist, collector of old books and co-builder of many digital products.Creativity
I'm interested in using creativity to solve complex problems to bring greater value to our world. I love working with teams.Teams
I've worked for start ups, enterprises and consultancies.Co-builder
I'm also a keen creator: I have built apps, platforms and courses from the ground up.Continuous learning
I have given talks (at global agile events) and written articles about agility, technology, creativity and strategy which you can read here.

Roles

How I can help you

You've got a goal and need some support to navigate the complexity.Let's work together towards an aspirational goal, stay agile and adaptable and deliver products and services that bring value to people important to you, and let's ensure the organisation thrives.

How can we do that?

Who have I worked with?

Accenture, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, Sky Media, VHI Health, Pendragon, Bank of Ireland, Volkswagen, International Monetary Fund, Food Economy Group, British Council ...... As well as hundreds of people from across the world!

mission

With a strong background in business and economics, a passion for technology, and a keen coaching stance, my mission is to help people focus on value, stay creative and keep learning.

I have been fortunate enough to build apps hands-on, as well guide teams as they build digital solutions, that combined have reached millions of users over the years.
I've commercialised products (B2B & B2C) and my experience has helped organisations discover and build valuable products.

Credentials

Languages

English (Native), German (Fluent), Spanish (Conversational), Arabic (Conversational)

Facilitating Lift Offs

Strategy Frameworks

Quarterly PI planning

Predictive reporting

Dashboards and reports

Wardley Strategy Mapping

Strategic Roadmaps

Scaling Agile (Safe6, Scrum@Scale)

Presentations & talks

Articles and Thought leadership

Deployment Plans (Dual track)

Risks and Issues

Remote Team Work!

Lean Portfolio Management

Recruiting and mentoring

Training and Seminars

The Arabic language was identified as a language of 'critical importance' and new resources were needed. Existing products were print, grammar-based and perceived to be difficult.Our Mission
Dispell the myth that Arabic is difficult by developing a fully comprehensive course based on the latest pedagogy and digitally available. This was developed with funding from the European Union.How I helped
- Designed and built the entire app (web, Android, iOS) with a small team of designers and developers.
- Built the eCommerce site.
- Commercialised the product for customers and enterprise clients.Result
It won an European Award for innovation and is still used by millions of users, universities and Governments around the world.

Context
A traditional publisher intended to develop a new digital platform for all its digital products. It was ambitious, and required a huge team to complete this work. An MVP was completed and it now needed to scale up.Problem
- The business was still operating in a waterfall way.
- No one in the business had scaled agile before.
- Departments were still siloed with some wishing to retain 'authority'.Hypothesis
The hypothesis was that by adopting a scaled agile framework (Scrum@Scale), the organisation could increase the capacity, align the teams, increase the deployments and also maintain a clear predictability of outcomes and deliver the platform.Role
Agile Coach and Transformation Team LeadKey responsibilities
- Full investigation of agile maturity and current impediments
- Set up and led a transformation team
- Prioritised the backlog of interventions
- Undertook agile coaching for key members
- Organised training in scaled agile for all members.

Outcomes
The business was able to scale agile (to new teams plus converting existing teams), increase the deployment frequency and attain a predictability (despite more capacity and high complexity) which in turn gave the business greater confidence. The outcome was further investment from the business, and the continued development of a platform, which now reaches millions of users worldwide.Reflection
It was a tough and intensive transformation which came into conflict with ways of working, culture, operations, fears - but that was inevitable! We were able to achieve the transformation by being confident, open-minded and experimental, and by 'being the change we want to see'.

Context
A healthcare company needed to migrate everything to the cloud and set up an Internal Developer Platform in line with DevSecOps practices.Problem
- Functional teams outsourced,
- Ubiquitous dependencies (persistently blocked work)
- Extremely sensitive data
- Sprint throughput of less than 50% and no predictability, impacting trust between the supplier and client.Hypothesis
By refactoring the entire set up (vision, alignment, team set up, contracts, artefacts) we will get greater clarity about what to do next, better throughput and better predictability for the business to make decisions.Role: Delivery Lead and Agile coach for a team of 40 peopleKey responsibilities
- Refactoring the team set up (cross-functional, agile)
- Refactored the vision and principles with architectural lead
- Brought standardisation and discipline to all artefacts (boards and documentation) and all ceremonies.
- Re-wrote all epics with team leads and moved to scaled agile set up.
- Agile 1-2-1 coaching and training for key members
- Budgeting, finance and contract negotiation with client.

Outcomes
The main outcome was the rebuilding of trust with the client. Trust is essentially:
- proving that we are capable of doing the work (refactoring teams and removing dependencies so that end-to-end work could get done),
- proving that we can continue to do it on the clients behalf (delivering approved value every sprint),
- proving that we do what we said we would do (improving the predictability of the sprint to almost 90% within a few sprints).The contract was continued and team morale improved.Reflection
There was not a moment during this lengthy engagement when I thought 'I can exhale now'. It was intense, stressful and high stakes. The key lessons for me during this engagement was the importance of the initial contract which determines the constraints of the engagement.

Seeking Greatness - The myth of the objective

In the face of unlimited possibilities, objectives provide a constraint.Unlimited possibility is like a white noise and by adding constraints, like an instrument does to white noise, we move potentiality into a defined actuality.

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Taking Risks to Advance your cause

'Seven Years in Tibet' is the story of Heinrich Harrer trying to escape war imprisonment in India and trekking through Tibet.Only one purpose - to be free - guided his every decision, and every risk that he chose to undertake.

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Burnout Trumps Agility

Survival (risk taking) and science are two different skills. One must first survive before one can prove anything.I’m going to provocatively make the point that, survival supercedes agility. Furthermore, I think one of the biggest threats to a team’s survival is ‘burnout’.

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