Paul Panayis Email & Phone Number

Maidenhead, England, United Kingdom

As their first full-time Scrum Master I helped the organisation, and teams, start to realise the benefit of following Scrum in it's entirety. I formulated several initiatives after speaking with everyone at the company and followed through with the support of the leadership team. These included:Improving work visibility by making sure everything each team worked on was in sprint;Making sure separate wiki's scattered around were visible to all developers;Making some official "professional development time" available to developers;Slowing down some meetings so the team had time to properly understand and discuss what they are being asked to do in the following sprint;There was some confusion around when each team's sprint started, so making this clearly visible to everyone;Making team's aware of their own velocity and how this is calculated;Getting the whole team involved in all refinement/sizing sessions. Discouraging any sessions about work that didn't involve the entire team;Following up on actions from retrospectives.. were they achieved or deemed no longer important?;Push back on external pressures to allow the team's to produce great quality product increments;Remove "noise" from Product backlogs so that the entire team understands what's in it as well as their relative priorities;Make the teams feel comfortable in their retro's. Its essential this is a safe place for them to discuss their problems, so removed all management from these meetings;Coaching the teams on how to get more value from their meetings;Refocusing Lead Developers on what they are really good at.. developing;Getting everyone engaged in Epics, by having Epic Introduction sessions;Allowing the Product owners to plan longer term by getting teams to early size large pieces or work and teaching the product owners how to run these sessions themselves;Stabilise the teams by discouraging shuffling team membership without reason;Show leadership the value of quarterly planning.

Berkshire

Putting the teams’ welfare and product quality first. Helping companies get the best from their teams. Helping teams to be more effective. Producing insightful reports to give leadership insight into the teams’ health and challenges. Working with product owners to produce good, data driven product plans.

Reading, England, United Kingdom

Working with four development teams, as well as the leadership team, at Invenias by Bullhorn. I was brought onboard to help the development teams reach a higher level of performance. Once I’d spoken to everyone involved, I quickly realised that most of the inefficiencies stemmed from the product inception point and rippled their way down the chain up to and including the development teams. The leadership team at Invenias were truly amazing, listening and acting on my suggestions and in almost no time we had vastly improved both team morale and productivity. One of the teams was using Scrum without being able to get the benefits of the framework, so we moved them to a Kanban system. This enabled the team to be more responsive as well as removing some of the overheads of the Scrum framework. We kept some of the Scrum ideas that would be helpful to the team like Daily Planning and Retrospectives. With the ability to be more flexible and responsive, the team also felt much more motivated as there were both fewer interruptions to their daily work and they knew they were working on the most important issues first.Working closely with the product team, we produced much better capacity planning for the group, so we were able to plan delivery with much more confidence. Combined with good agile planning practices we were able to start producing viable and measurable product plans for 3 month – 9 month periods at a time.

London, United Kingdom

After doing the Scrum Master role for the team on and off for a while (we used to choose one at the start of every sprint), Fourth underwent a major scalability reorganisation, with the objective of becoming a 4x -10x larger company.As part of this reorganisation I was given the opportunity to be Scrum Master on a more permanent basis. Although I didn't initially jump at the chance, as I love being a software developer, my insatiable curiosity would never let me turn down an opportunity to try something new. I very quickly learnt that I enjoyed the different challenges and skills that had to be applied to this position. As a developer I would always offer help and assistance to anyone that needed it — as a Scrum Master this was the biggest part of my job!Another part of the reorganisation was the introduction of proper governance for the teams. An essential part to scaling up a company. It was great to be part of this process and I am a member of one of the governance teams responsible for prioritising the scrum team's backlog. We implemented a SAFe-like structure so that the we could align the scrum teams, but these are just the first steps of an ever evolving landscape.All-in-all a varied, interesting and challenging role within Fourth that gives me both a high level business perspective, drilling right down to removing individual impediments so our Scrum team could perform at its best.

London, England

Working in Covent Garden as a C#, Visual Basic, WebAPI and SQL Server developer for a primarily SaaS (Software as a Service) organisation.Working in a multi-national scrum team of around a dozen people as part of a larger development team of around 80 people.The team uses Rally as a SCRUM tool, GIT and Mercurial as Source Control. We develop primarily on Visual Studio C#, but have historic Visual Basic 6 COM components to maintain. Some of our latest software is based on WebAPI2 using Visual Studio 2013.Using the Redgate SQLServer developer toolkit to manage database releases along with Jenkins for release control, versioning, automatic build and project deployment.A varied and interesting role that has me learning lots of new technologies.

Bracknell, United Kingdom

A more strategic position than my previous roles, the Group IT Manager position within the Nike Group of companies still involved rolling up my sleeves and designing and developing on occasion.I was directly responsible for all aspects of IT within twelve of the group's companies, with advisory roles at varying levels in six others.I was given the challenge of turning around an internal IT support service that had a very poor reputation with all Nike Group staff to one that is now efficient, friendly and very well regarded within the company. This involved both staff changes and the selection and mentoring of new staff.I transitioned the internal network infrastructure, I moved multiple ageing servers into a virtualised environment. I transformed the company's backup strategy and greatly improved their risk exposure and contingency plans.I had the responsibility for contract negotiations (which I had some exposure to on previous occasions) and made sure that both terms and prices were negotiated to save the company tens of thousands of pounds annually.A very varied role that provided a great deal of satisfaction.

United Kingdom

I developed an event management system for a charity. A close friend, who works with many charities, including Beaford Arts - a performing arts charity, told me that they needed a system to manage their growing portfolio of events and performances.I designed and developed the system in my spare time, using license-free software (.NET express editions for both the client and the database).

Basingstoke, United Kingdom

This pensions and life company had a massive portfolio of Group Pensions. I established document standards for the company as well as help a large development team constantly deliver fast, efficient software for administration of these pensions.The main administration system is used to administer Winterthur Life (AXA Wealth) Group Pensions (CIMPs, GPPs), Personal Pensions, Executive Pensions, TIPS, Investment Bond, Income Drawdown and other pension/investment related business.The system controls all aspects of open block group pension business including receipts of monies, share allocation, fund re-pricing, double entry accounting, payments (for income drawdown and investment bond), direct credit/debit, business reports, customer correspondence etc.This was a very fulfilling role and presented many challenges including handling volumes of data I had not experienced before. This was an ideal opportunity for me to improve my skills in database design and performance tuning, n-tier systems architecture and to develop a deeper understanding of the UK pensions industry.

London, United Kingdom

I was given this London based opportunity as my first experience in the financial industry.Once again, a project had come to a dead end and completely stalled.I was given the challenge of assessing it's current state and then moving onwards to completion.During this role I developed a good understanding of benefit schemes, customer contributions, double entry accounting, share purchases and vesting calculations.

Fernhurst, United Kingdom

An interesting role through Anderson Consulting. Development of a very object oriented architecture. This role gave me some unique experience in multi-site international data platforms.

Frimley, United Kingdom

A great experience in an international software company. It was also my first exposure to the advantages and restriction of working within a waterfall development structure.I was given the challenge of moving forward a stalled manufacturing project and delivering a fully featured software product. It was also my first experience of working in the USA for project installations and final fit on customer sites.Responsible for developing not only software, but also documentation and coding standards. I also took on the role of training some of the less experienced developers on the team.

Ascot, United Kingdom

CPL was a small, friendly software arm of a well established networking company.A great start to my career, I got my first experience of development in a commercial environment.After a good and successful grounding in the full SDLC, I moved onto a management position.

Enfield, United Kingdom

After helping other students during my degree work I was offered a position at the University as a workshop tutor for MSc level students.

Bsc (Hons), Artificial Intelligence, 1St

Btec Hnd, Engineering, 5 Distinctions

A Levels, Maths, Computer Science, Physics