Samantha Derham Email & Phone Number

Johannesburg Metropolitan Area

https://beyondteams.co.za/I build high performing, motivated, value-focused and innovative teams. I build working environments where every person feels confident and safe to speak openly about their ideas of how to do things better and raise concerns before they become a critical issue. Along with this I also ensure every person is fully aligned to the overall objectives and purpose of the work that needs to be done. With these in place, teams get the work they need to get done within the committed timelines. They are also innovative and able to add the edge to the products they are building that makes the difference between mediocre products and extra-ordinary products.I do this at the same time as ensuring projects meet their management and reporting expectations.

Johannesburg Metropolitan Area

2 month contract to fill in for a project manager.The main client I took over had major project delays, risks as well as bugs released to their production environment as a result of many failings across the delivery lifecycle. In this time I recovered the project delivery cadence, put in place several measures to significantly improve ways of working and communication, and overall left the team and client with a lasting understanding of how the issues arose and how to continue to work together to avoid similar issues from coming up again in the future. A second client I supported was severely impacted by a miss-alignment between what they wanted and what was delivered. I quickly recognised that this was a result of their requirements never being properly documented. Through the process of capturing and aligning all requirements, even though there would be delays in delivery, I was able to rescue the clients confidence that they had chosen the right payment solution provider.

South Africa

This short time with BasaltX was an absolute career highlight for me. I was confronted with easily some of the most testing challenges I’ve ever faced, and when addressing them not only found that all of my experience up to this point prepared me to be able to successfully resolve them, I also felt that I flourished being the central point and enabler of communications and decisions between the delivery team, client, their teams, suppliers as well as our own business.• PM for a new build of a trail-blazing white-labeled mobile trading application, with integrations to a trading CRM and KYC provider, future ready design and architecture to incorporate a wide range of additional financial services • Role required significant efforts to capture, refine and confirm the clients very ambitious and constantly changing ideas, requirements and priorities into a realistic releasable first product• I filled the role of a BA as the biggest gap in the beginning of the project was clear requirements. After finding and hiring a new BA, we continued to work closely together to confirm requirements which I translated into tasks and user stories for the delivery team• Success was greatly supported from establishing very strong, trust-based rapport with the client, 20+ of their SME’s and the integration partners, as this allowed for candid and rapid access to necessary information• My agile coaching experience allowed me to establish ways of working with buy-in from the team that enabled the delivery of valuable work with very little waste despite the high degree of uncertainty and changing requirements

London, England, United Kingdom

Consultant placed at Shell London for the duration of this contract. • Agile coach for the customisation and implementation of software for marine wind farm operation and maintenance• Agile Hiring Manager: streamlined and documented the hiring process for Shell’s Agile Practice and hired 30+ agile professionals across a wide range of lines of business• Senior scrum master for a SAFe team developing greenfield Carbon Trading analysis software considering the complex variables of forest regeneration over time• Senior scrum master and BA for the customisation and implementation of two third party SaaS solutions for Shell’s workplace managementEvery team had about half of the members based in India, and the rest between the UK and the Netherlands. Project accountability or responsibility was often based in the US.During my time with Shell, Agile ways of working transitioned from something that was seen as more of an experiment used alongside traditional project delivery practices and governance, to one of the most preferred ways of delivering projects with a digital component. As a result I had to work very closely with the project managers and ensure that any agile delivery practices still met the stringent requirements of Shell’s Project Delivery Framework. However in that same time a new Project Delivery Framework was developed which incorporated and gave more flexibility to many of the core agile practices such as transparent communication, horizontal team-work, learner mindset, customer focus, experimentation, iterative value and psychological safety, to name a few.I feel very fortunate for the vast exposure and experience I gained from coaching teams made up of incredible talent covering the full spectrum of agile experience, and being involved with and supported by Shell’s Agile Practice where we could discuss, share and learn challenges, coaching techniques and delivery experiments.

Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Drawing upon my agile experience of building strong trust based relationships, I drove changes in 120 year-old institutionalised practices of Africa’s largest food market - the Joburg Fresh Produce Market. As a result myself and one other person succeeded in getting donations of more than 250 tonnes of fresh produce to feed people in need during the hardest times of the Covid lockdowns.

London, United Kingdom

• Scrum master across 5 different teams working on very different projects• Teams were remote and distributed across Europe and the US• Agile coach across the organisation, from developers to the executive team, teaching the practices and benefits of adopting an agile mindset and culture• Transitioned the company from a mostly waterfall, ad-hoc and organic start-up way of working to a methodical resilient agile cadence composed of teams empowered with the habits to identify and solve their own challenges• Produced a range of metrics across different time scales to gain insights of where improvements could produce the most results• Improvements in communication, visibility and a clearer understanding of roles improved trust between departments and more consistent delivery of the right finished products• Implemented a wide range of improvements in working and communication processes• Attended the monthly Agile Round-about talks, including one by Jeff Sutherland where I initiated a discussion about the role of psychological safety in ScrumConversocial is a B2B Social Media CRM, meaning that the teams work closely with all major messaging channels, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple.

London, United Kingdom

• Dedicated Scrum Master for the Group Infrastructure Team, responsible for supporting and improving the infrastructure and networks of four countries, and about 150 developers• Breadth and scope of this team’s responsibilities resulted in the need for me to engage with almost every area of the business, and wearing a Product Owner and Project Manager hat at times in order to improve the process, quality and understanding of work coming in, prioritised and completed • Light-touch SM for the InfoSec team, who worked closely with the Infra teamSignificantly improved relationships between this team and the rest of the company• Improved the visibility of their prioritised work and expectations of when work would be completed• Reduced the team’s backlog from an unprioritised dump of hundreds of tickets to a prioritised living backlog of ready work• Reduced the lead time of the average BAU ticket from 4 days to 1 day• Significantly less distractions resulted in more time spent on project work• Organised training sessions for all tech teams across the organisation to learn more about what everyone else was working on, improving the quality of collaboration between teams and giving everyone a stronger and renewed sense of their purpose

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Placed as a Consultant to Wonga Finance as a project administrator. Two months into this role I had established strong relationships with both the engineering department and the business and naturally adopted a role of enabling better communications and expectation management between the two. I was invited to fill the role of Scrum Master where I worked with 5 development teams for the successful delivery of a front-end rewrite and a greenfield customer product, as well as several other small product enhancements. At the time of accepting this role I was studying Complexity Theory and Systems thinking as part of my Post Graduate Diploma, which is the foundational theory of Agile.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

• Partnered with sustainability service providers to develop corporate sustainability initiative plans, considering water harvesting, PV solar, organic waste management and biogas projects. Companies included AfriSam Concrete, Rand Water, Shell and Howden Engineering• Consulted with IQ Business to review the capabilities and experience of applicants of an ABSA Barclays CSI initiative to deliver environmental and social upliftment programmes across Africa.• Provided business consulting on environmental regulations and best practices• Organised a range of talks on sustainable living and business for a number of organisations, including Mensa, Food & Trees for Africa, Museum Africa, KlipSA

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

• Worked on a wide variety of initiatives aimed at improving and uplifting the South of Joburg, partnering with the organisation’s network of over 500 locally based businesses (from sme's to multinational), municipal service delivery organisations, ward councillors, police and local media• Organised monthly Green Business Events to educate local businesses about potential environmental impacts and discuss various sustainable solutions• Organised a number of fundraising events, including one with 1500 people

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

• Editing and collation of reports required for Environmental Impact Assessments, primarily for large National Energy Distribution Infrastructure projects• Daily application of the South African Environmental Acts and Gazettes• Stakeholder engagement and building large Public Participation databases

Auckland, New Zealand

RESPONSIBILITIES AND ACHIEVEMENTS:• Research for commercial and residential environmental consent applications and appeals with regards to Planning, Building By-laws and New Zealand’s Resource Management Act• Preparation of legal appeal summaries for resource consent appeals• Used a wide range of SAP programs for research, recording and process monitoring• Engagement with multiple levels of council and government

Auckland

Exposure to almost every issue and query dealt with by a world class city council, and the resolution processThis call centre was voted one of the top 10 in the world in this timeReceived regular training in effective communication, stakeholder engagement and problem resolution - skills which were needed and used constantly

Bachelor Of Science, Biology/Biological Sciences, General

Activities and Societies: Treasurer, Vice President and Events Organiser of the Biology Students Association | Advanced EquestrianDouble.

Post Graduate Diploma, Sustainable Development

Graduated with Cum Laude, Political Economics of Sustainable Development specialisation. The Sustainability Institute School.

Pgd, Political Economics Of Sustainable Development