Braunton, England, United Kingdom
Highly experienced Practitioner, Consultant, Trainer and Mentor specialising in Agile (iterative, incremental, business focused and change responsive) approaches to managing business change. Also competent with traditional approaches (e.g. PRINCE2) with significant experience blending agile and traditional practices to meet corporate and individual project needs. Specialties: Agile Methods & Practices consultant, trainer and mentor, Agile Business Consortium certified professional (Catalyst level), certified Agile Project Management (AgilePM) and Scrum Trainer and Coach, Certified Scrum Master (since 2003 - trained by Ken Schwaber). Primary work focus: Agile transformation; Agile capability building; process change to an Agile way of thinking and working; and Agile Project, Programme and Portfolio Management training and mentoring.
I am the founder of nlighten which is primarily a vehicle to support my career as a freelance agile consultant, trainer and mentor, although I have also put together and led small teams of like-minded practitioners via nlighten for clients embarking on more ambitious transformation projects.
The Agile Business Consortium is a not for profit organisation dedicated to advancing business agility world-wide - including promoting best practice in Agile Leadership, Agile Governance, Agile Portfolio Management, Agile Programme Management, Agile Project Management and Agile Delivery. I have held various positions with the Consortium on a voluntary, employed and freelance basis since 2003. My most recent piece of work is amongst the most significant. As product architect, I designed the latest version of the Consortium's world-leading Agile Project Management (AgilePM) framework and authored the latest version the AgilePM Reference Book. It has been one of the most rewarding periods of my career to date to lead a highly tallented team of professionals within and external to the Consortium to create an exceptional product from both agile and educational perspectives
I have worked with both Corporate IT and Sonova's retail division Connect Hearing part time and as needed since 2012. Initially the engagement was training-focused but in more recent years has broadened into consulting coaching and mentoring for key staff in Corporate IT, the majority of whom are responsible for supporting, mainitaining and enhancing the SAP system at the hear of their business. Sonova blazed a trail of agility with SAP several years before SAP themselves considered it a viable way of working. From summer 2017 to early 2018 I managed a project within Corporate IT to introduce an eLearning programme guiding a team of senior managers and project managers in the Agile content for the training modules that they created themselves for the benefit of their colleagues and projects. The key focus of this project was to support the IT element of a massive programme of work to align the Sonova business US FDA CLass III medical device regulatons. As part of this project I created nlighten's AgilePM Foundation eLearning course co-funded by Sonova and now in use by them internally to train well over 100 agile project staff.
As lead consultant at Daiwa, I provided consultancy services to management at all levels, designing and helping to implement a new Agile governance framework for all IT enabled business change. Training and coaching in Agile Project Management. This was based on AgilePM - the UKs longest established full-project Agile approach - and formed the backbone of the Agile transformation at the bank. Two highly talented nlighten associates were also engaged full time along with various specialists with skills needed to transform the organisation from a start point where projects lacked business ownership and focus and often struggled to deliver to an end point where business drive and collaboration on all levels was the new reality. The highlight of the engagement was the successful delivery of project to replace the legacy mainframe technology at the heart of the business. Legacy replacement projects are amongst those most likely to fail - often spectacularly - but not this time. Making this a business led, organisation-wide, operational change programme rather than an IT led technology replacement project assured success. The £8M programme delivered on-time, slightly under budget and achieved an Internal Rate of Return in excess of 30% over 5 years. Not bad for something originally conceived as a risk-mitigating technology project!
Initially with Swiftcover and more recently with it parent company AXA, I was engaged in a variety of roles helping the organisation embed and exploit Agile ways of working with tremendous positive impact. Following a brief engagement of a few days providing Swiftcover with an introduction to Agile development practices I started a longer term role with them as Development Manager. This role blended a hands-on management role with the ongoing definition, development and roll-out of a an agile project and software delivery framework based on AgilePM. The adoption of AgilePM and the huge success that Swiftcover had with it were instrumental to their rapid growth as the UKs first wholly on-line motor insurer.