Agile Coach

(CONTRACTOR) Having first introduced Scrum to Confused.com back in 2008 it was an absolute delight to be asked to return, this time as an Agile Coach. I was recruited by the CTO (Andy), who felt some of the teams had lost their way a bit and needed a tune-up. My remit was to review the way teams had implemented Scrum, coach the Scrum Masters and improve their Agile ways of working. My approach was simple: ✓ I offered myself as coach and mentor to six of the Scrum team's Scrum Masters, as well as one or two Product Owners. I had weekly one-to-one sessions with them all, during which we tackled any issues they were having with their teams, as well as training them on Scrum theory and practices.
✓ I also attended their Scrum Events as a silent observer. After each session I provided the Scrum Master with detailed feedback of what went well and suggestions on how they might improve. This proved very effective.
✓ Andy was keen to track improvements, so I created a simple Scrum Checklist that each of the Scrum Masters scored to track their progress and highlight areas for improvement. After teams had mastered the first checklist, I created a second one to cover more advanced Agile techniques that I then started coaching the Scrum Masters, e.g. Agile mindset, servant leadership, collective ownership etc. The results have been outstanding, with novice Scrum Masters becoming Scrum Master specialists in just months, rather than years.
✓ Other changes I introduced were: o Scrum of Scrums - to ensure better communication across all the Scrum teams. In particular this helped with consistency of technical design and better dependency management between the teams.
o Scrum Mastermind - this was a Scrum Master community where they could share challenges and issues as well as ideas for improving their Agile ways of working.

During my time at Confused.com I coached, trained and mentored a total of 16 Scrum Masters and 8 Product Owners over a two year period.
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON, Copenhagen, Denmark APR 2020 - NOV 2020 Global digital agency with 200 offices in 90 markets.
AGILE PROJECT MANAGER, SCRUM MASTER & AGILE COACH (PERMANENT) Wunderman had been trying to adopt Agile processes in the Technology & Development team ("TAD") but they were not realizing the benefits they had hoped for. I was brought in as an Agile specialist to identify why Agile was not as effective as expected and to improve the ways of working.
Interviewing key members of the team and observing the way the team was working allowed me to introduce several initiatives: ✓ When I joined, the Scrum team had 20 people and was clearly far too big. We broke this down into two teams each with its own Scrum Master. Communication and focus improved dramatically. I became the second team's Scrum Master responsible for all the new feature development.
✓ Monthly Sprints were being continually delayed and dragging on into 2-3 months. Key Scrum ceremonies were also being ignored. I introduced 2 week Sprints as well as more discipline around Sprint planning, demos and retrospectives. Team members started to see the benefits of Agile for themselves and this helped with their buy-in to the other changes we were trying to introduce.
✓ Testing was not being automated and consequently the overhead for each production release was too large because so much manual testing had to be done. It was agreed that the test approach had to change and automating tests had to be included in our definition of done. We also started to look for a Dev Ops specialist to recruit onto the team.
✓ Senior business stakeholders were frustrated because features were taking much longer to deliver than estimated. We are in the process of agreeing KPI's with the business so we have a benchmark to track improvements and for transparency.
We experienced a big rise in productivity and the morale of the team as a whole.

(CONTRACTOR - MUTIPLE EXTENSIONS) Goal of the project: To create web dashboards of aggregated financial data for client executive level management, e.g. pension plan participation and total assets under management.
Immediately discovered the need to change ways of working and the way we were adopting Scrum: ✓ There was no Definition of READY or Definition of DONE, so getting these agreed was one of the first tasks we worked on when I joined the team.
✓ Formal business acceptance during and at the end of each Scrum was not in place. We identified who on the business should fill this role and agreed with that person that they should engage with the delivery team not only at the end of each Sprint for the demo, but on a daily basis if necessary to ensure the feedback loop was as early as possible in the development cycle.
✓ The development team was offshore. It was important for me to build rapport with the team so I travelled to India at the first opportunity and encouraged the senior members of the team to travel to the UK when they could. This allowed me to build stronger relationships with the team not only because of in person meetings, but being able to spend time with the team after work in a social context.
✓ I ensured our retrospectives were more effective. Rather than having a long list of actions to improve upon in the next Sprint I had the team just pick on one or two behaviours they prioritized themselves and focus on just those. This resulted and much more effective continuous improvement.
The team improved and became more efficient. Quality was also enhanced and the project was delivered successfully in January.

(CONTRACTOR - CONTRACT EXTENDED) Upgrade of PrognoSysTM - state-of-the-art, market-leading, automated, medical underwriting system.
When I first joined the project team there were a number of challenges. The previous year's upgrade had been fraught with issues and senior stakeholders had lost confidence in the team. The company had recently decided to adopt Agile and roll it out across the business. Many in the team were new to Agile. The roll out and training at the end of 2017 had been poor. Those new to Agile were put off and, as a result, were resisting the new method. The team had been given what many thought was an impossible delivery date and the project status was AMBER. Needless to say, team moral was low.
There were a number of actions I took to try to get the team back on track. I immediately positioned myself as a project manager who genuinely wanted to understand the team's problems and challenges and help resolve these. I held face to face meetings with the key members of the team to let them vent and to listen to their frustrations. I then took action to try to solve some of their key problems, e.g. becoming the interface with senior stakeholders. I introduced Agile techniques by stealth, avoiding using the term "Agile" (which had become a dirty word). So we used techniques like scoping the MVP, plan-on-a-page, short focused meetings, Kanban etc all on their own merit.
Slowly the team responded. As the team grew in confidence and started to work better together, it soon became evident that maybe we could make this deadline after all. As senior stakeholders saw the improved performance they left the team alone to get on with it. The team began to accept this way of working as they could see real benefits.
Within a couple of months the project status moved to GREEN for the first time. Later in the project we encountered some serious issues, e.g. multiple illnesses within the team, a new big requirement from the business late in the project we hadn't expected that absolutely had to be done. By now the team's maturity and self-confidence was such that they were able to meet these challenges head on and still deliver on time.
The final result was a team firing on all cylinders, who had achieved what most had believed was simply not possible.
This was a high profile project, senior stakeholder confidence had returned and executive leadership were delighted with the results. The original deadline of 28-Sep-18 that had been set in November 2017 had been achieved and we were 10% under budget.