Portfolio

Agiliqui Consulting Ltd is proud to have worked with all previous clients, and respectfully records the crossing of our agile paths here.

Radtac 2019

Adhoc work as freelance trainer with Radtac Ltd for solo or pair-trained 2-day Product Owner and Scrum Master courses.

Using Radtac and client approved material, these courses covered the theory, principles, skills, competencies, rules of Scrum and Product Ownership. Practical and interactive, paced for plenty of questions, how-to-do, and real life examples, I have trained around 200 people to date on a syllabus equivalent to CSM / CSPO

"Really enjoyed the course earlier this week, very thought provoking and I liked your teaching style"
Dave

"so impressed... "
Bimal

Three 2018

A direct call for help from some former colleagues at Three; "can I help solve all their problems ?" was the semi serious request.

No, but I could add some value to the current situation.

There was a desire for the benefits of agile working, but no real idea how to get them.

Borrowing from the SAFe and LeSS frameworks, and re-instating the rules of single team scrum, I established a component team model for the entire Loyalty App ecosystem. There were some frank conversations about what was up for change and what wasn't, because recognising the boundaries of the system is important for successful change.

Here's what evolved:
from being confused about what the products were, to understanding products versus components, and structuring the teams accordingly

from multiple, tangled and little used project plans to prioritised backlogs for each team
from no scrum events to established, habitual use of planning, daily scrums, reviews and retrospectives
from no communicated vision, strategy or roadmap to a traceable set of backlog items which contributed to the agreed strategy

from management's closed room planning, to something approaching 'PI Planning'; a quarterly response to the senior product owner's strategy, which crucially after 3 quarters was a plan created by and committed to by the teams doing the work. Big change, that.

And the culture changed over that period. Honest sprint reviews rather than evasive weekly status meetings. The scrum pillars of transparency, inspection and adaption were clearly recognisable by the end of the engagament.

British Airways 2015

Here I was running a scrum team on a major e-commerce project with an all new user experience on a full stack technology transformation. Challenging technical features to deliver using scrum included a bespoke test and learn capability on ba.com to run beta features through multi variate tests,, and an all new shopping cart based infrastructure for booking flights and ground products.

Quickly helping the team to run smoothly with a highly technical 'component' backlog (it wasn't a product) backlog, this is where the scrum values and the people behaviours flourished to drive good outcomes.

Seeing software engineers grow into new skills on this team was highly rewarding and testimony to the BA's approach. The team needs a new database ? Don't create dependencies by 'sub-contracting' it to an lready stacked DB team - learn how to build it yourself , with specialist DBAs to mentor and hold accountable. It was tough but it worked, as the engineers learned J meter, Angular , DB and REST skills from scratch on this project.

Beyond this team, together with another scrum master, I helped re-energise BA Digital's scrum teams by establishing an agile effectiveness group and internal community for sharing agile practices, problems and solutions.

Three 2016-17

Initially hired as Scrum Master to help re-set the App team disrupted by an organisational change, this team had been through too many recent changes for any efficient way of working to have survived. I immediately showed the team how to control their workflow and increase delivery through scrum; this team went onto achieve 4 star rated Android and iOS apps and a near doubling of its user base, hitting the associated business targets. I was so proud to see the team win Three's Outstanding Team of the Year award for their improvements a few months later.

By this time the Head of Digital was thinking about the potential value of an agile coach. He wasn't getting the vibe from people who replied to the first wave, so I talked to him about what to look for - and promptly talked myself into the role.....

Warmly accepted by the Scrum Masters, Product Owners and (most of) the team members, I focussed on improving Scrum Master practitioner levels, teaching and coaching Product Owners, teaching scrum, facilitating and coaching at 1-1 and group level. I worked to embed functioning backlogs and product roadmaps; guided teams towards success through scrum, and promoted an agile mindset for the Digital leaders.

Harnessing enthusiasm from others to help me, I ran training sessions on BDD, user story mapping, 'great scrum events', systems thinking and interactive learning workshops for non agile IT areas on scrum - back of the room and highly interactive training which got great feedback.

10 months into that and bigger changes in the organisation meant we'd gone as far as we were going to go right now. That was fine, as the improvements were there, measured and measurable. Time to let it go, leaving the door still open...