I now work as a Agile Business Analyst Consultant for Flexiblethinking Ltd which delivers Agile capability uplifts to critical projects and ICAgile Agile training and Agile Coach development.I also leverage my extensive business skills as a NED & Board Advisor supporting exciting startups and helping them fulfil their potential.

Working in the Apps dev team I have led the transformation in working practices which has resulted in a dramatic improvement in team productivity. By leading from the front and consistently role-modelling agile behaviours whilst serving the team as BA/Coach the team have incorporated agile working practices and agile behaviours - respect for each other, collaboration, improvement and learning cycles, pride in ownership, focus on delivering value, and is a safe place from which to adapt to change.

Scrum master for the Claims team as part of a full systems refresh. As servant leader on this blended on/off-site team I’ve worked closely with technical and business team members to instil a trusting environment where we have moved to high performance by constantly refining our practices, communicating without fear and believing in the power of the team to sort problems.

As part of a ‘Day 2’ programme of optimisations I am part of a team working to move an “Offline” business savings application onto the bank’s eCommerce platform. The key objectives being to drive up conversions by enabling online opening of a portfolio of savings products and then via embedding automations to automatically open accounts. Led the envisaging workshops to define the new online application journey. Working closely with the IT Architect to define the new integrations needed to transform offline application into online account opening. Working closely with our Digital team building the user journey on the business’s eCommerce platform and with IT integration to define the new middleware services needed to auto-populate business data from Companies House; to auto-load application data into the back-office and to auto-open the account. Close collaboration with Product Owner to develop a prioritised backlog; with UX to develop detailed user experience and then with Digital and Integration via 3 amigo sessions to arrive at Ready to develop stories.Tools: TFS; user story mapping; user story creation; 3 amigo sessions; Json data models

Agile BA working on a huge complex system refresh delivering an end to end Customs declaration processing service for imports to and exports from the UK. The system currently manages in excess of 50 million transactions per year, enables a £700 billion a year international supply chain and accounts for £34 billion a year revenue. Agile BA in the Digital scrum team tasked with ensuring the optimum user experience through Digital front end and API based access. As an integral member of a user centered design team bringing user centered principles to this huge project I am the bridge between Business and development team, gathering user journeys, volumetrics to better focus business needs, building and maintaining a healthy product backlog and collaborating closely with user researchers and product owners to balance and blend business needs with UX derived user needs. Writing effective user stories, collaborating closely with dev team through regular backlog refinement and 3 amigo sessions to ensure stories are Ready for development. Supporting dev team members through development with story queries.Stand in as proxy scrum master to facilitate retrospectives and sprint planning and representing the team with interface to programme management and scrum of scrums to articulate and resolve blockers.Rapidly building effective working relationships with other development teams to resolve queries and issues and schedule intra-dependent releases.Digital Solutions experience: Internal and External facing microservice APIs; Json specifications; Digital Web user interface

Intermediary Product Transfer ProjectPart of an Scrum team introducing a product transfer capability into the legacy app used by brokers to place mortgages with Virgin Money. As Agile BA I facilitated workshops with a range of internal and external stakeholders to envisage the customer journey and establish the business requirements. Worked with team members to ensure stories evolved to be ‘Ready' for implementation and layed out stories over future iterations to visualise go-live opportunities.Led the definition of complex data requirements needed to successfully map over 300 data items from the product transfer application into the legacy back-office mortgage processing system. Facilitated the build of a novel test harness to enable resubmission of product transfer requests allowing us to use TDD with our delivery partner - specifying, implementing and testing the interface in half the time taken by a previous project.Launched in early July delighting the business and customers: "The product transfer process was a pleasure to behold – certainly the best I have come across and gives me yet another reason to use Virgin….!! Virgin Money is now on fire J !!!!!!"Intermediary Touch Point Analysis and SolutionAs Business Analyst I have taken sole responsibility for delivering this important analysis and proposition within a very short timescale. Piecewise improvement had resulted in confusing outbound communications causing excess inbound telephony queries. Mapped out the mortgage processing process, internal system touchpoints and triggers clearly on a large wall. Overlaying external comms and pain points I was able to talk a varied set of stakeholders from key operatives to members of the leadership team over the problem allowing them to easily visualise the issues and solution options. This has delighted senior business stakeholders – the Lab Director has described it as a ‘Wonderwall’ whilst inviting the Heads of Operations and Mortgages to walk it.

I am an experienced Agile Coach, Facilitator, Mentor, Leader and Consultant with over 25 years project experience implementing and delivering systems in complex environments coupled to deep organisational change experience helping organisations be more agile, efficient and predictable. I have real experience in Agile adoption both at project and organisation level with a particular focus on changing behaviours and thinking. By blending my organisational change experience with Agile expertise I am an effective Enterprise Agile Coach coupling deep expertise with highly effective communication skills and the focus on helping people move from just doing agile to Being Agile. I deliver highly rated interactive public and in-house ICAgile accredited Agile training classes that organisations exploit to help them embed the Agile mindset. I am accredited to teach the Fundamentals of Agile; Foundation Agile Coaching, Advanced Agile Coaching, Agile Project Management and Agile Value Management.

Specialising in Process Improvement I am an acknowledged expert delivering pragmatic, hands-on consultancy and training focussed on rapid skills transfer and helping organisations drive up predictability and quality by the pragmatic application of techniques ranging from Agile, through DevOps to CMMI. I focus on making these real for our customers, making them a tool for business advantage, helping businesses with real-world Agile adoption, taking account of complications like existing governance, scale and the use of outsource partners. I have the experience to bring DevOps principles to life and ensure that the practices exist to ensure they are baked in to the organisations working methods. My expertise includes Agile, Scrum, CMMI, ITIL and more. Building on my long experience with Agile I am an ICAgile authorised instructor for Agile Fundamentals; Agile Team Facilitation and Agile Coaching.

Founder Director of Ortia a Rational focussed process improvement consultancy. Over this period grew the business to be one of the premier partners to Rational delivering services to many customers nationally an internationally centred around installation of RUP and Rational tools. Rational certified trainer and consultant in RUP, Requirements Management with Use Cases, and Object Oriented Analysis and Design with UML.

Over my time at Orange I adopted Iterative development techniques (for-runner of Agile) based upon IBM-Rational's RUP. Also got involved in process improvement and DevOps through improvements in our own team but also via increasing collaboration with the network integration test team in Bristol. We incorporated the test team into our requirements capture process to ensure that products were testable and incorporated operability requirements. This led to large reductions in re-work and dramatically reduced time to market.From a technical perspective I worked as part of a small team building on previous experience with a range of messaging applications that supported Hutchison Telecom's UK wide paging network. Subsequently engineered a number of paging to short message gateways to support the launch of Orange in the UK. Moved on to contribute to a highly novel Amstrad PDA joint venture which was up-engineered to incorporate a pager so that it could receive news, sports, TV listings etc. I was personally responsible for the information capture subsystem that scraped information off 'ceefax'. Unfortunately the product failed because of interference from the pager.Over this time got into automated build and testing and also learned the hard lessons driving the need to place test and production platform configurations under full control.Also designed and built a subsystem to extract network engineering telemetry from a mobile phone to provide the input into a highly GIS based real time network analysis tool for Orange field engineers.I developed my technical skills becoming fluent in C++ with a small amount of Java. I also became a very experienced Architect, highly competent with UML and object oriented design approaches.Expert with ClearCase, Rose and Requisite Pro.

A hectic period that included one year spent with Nortel in Ottawa working on the Nortel network management product. Over this time i became expert in the application of the Unix system call layer with a focus on inter-process communication. Participated in a 'big system test' at the Nortel factory in Montreal with a specific focus on expanding the network management span of control and identifying the system bottlenecks that held this back. On return to London I designed, implemented and tested a radical mechanism to increase throughput by introducing robust flow-control to the messaging layer, re-implementing it to exploit shared memory. Lots of experience with network management protocols - CMISE etc.

Spent two enjoyable years learning about telecommunications and writing a significant management application on the companies first network management system focussed on managing syncronous transmissions technology.