Simon Girvan Email & Phone Number

Tewkesbury, Gb

Tewkesbury, Gb

United Kingdom

Principal Consultant and Agile Coach focussed on Essence - an open standard for describing practices and methods that helps individuals, teams and organisations get better value from their development processes. Essence isn't another method; by focussing on the essential elements of the endeavour, it helps you apply existing methods and processes more effectively and learn them more quickly.

Swindon, United Kingdom

Subject Matter Expert in Agile for the BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT. Involved in reviewing syllabus and other content for the BCS Agile Foundation and Practitioner Certificates.

Responsible for technical leadership and direction for a major strategic initiative to make better use of cloud technologies and improve productivity of software development teams. As Product Owner, leads multiple agile industry and in-house teams developing tools, patterns, services and products that enable a development community of over 2000 to embrace DevSecOps and CI/CD practices and cloud native mindsets.

Agile Coach working with multiple teams and stakeholders in highly technical public sector organisations. Applying agile mindset and practices within my own teams, but also working with other teams including coaching SCS leaders and working on cross organisational projects.Achieved CSP-SM and working toward CTC on an Agile Coaching Development programme.On the organising committee for an internal 2 day Agile Conference and an accomplished speaker and workshop facilitator. Spoke externally in 2019 at Agile Manchester, Agile Business Conference and Business Analysis Europe Conference.

England

Technical Director and Agile lead for a new software development department providing bespoke software for internal government customers. The team is growing fast, on track to reach 100 by next FY, and we focus on applying solid agile principles in complex environments.In this role, I have developed new approaches to structure and manage work to optimise the development of staff and balance with dependable delivery to customers. I have taken agile approaches and optimised them for multiple geographically distributed teams, developed a model to balance the complexity of the work against the skill of the team and a prioritisation scheme that allows team skill development to sometimes take priority over schedule.My teams work in multiple technologies including web front end, near-real time processing, elastic search, micro services, component architectures and even VHDL. We cover the whole software lifecycle, including business analysis, UX, software analysis, design and development, and testing with a generalising specialist model for our staff. I have also started a new apprenticeship scheme and several development schemes to bring on new talent.

An engineering leadership team role, responsible for leading the introduction of a new pay system to a large, predominantly technical business unit. Ensured that part of the change was a stronger link between advancing the strategy and reward, and led on communicating the business change and coaching managers to use it effectively.Conducted a major review of technical pay by reviewing the external market, creating pen pictures to map to career progression and mapping pay ranges to job weight.Leading an increase in the number of staff achieving professional registration and recognition (CEng, FIET, FBCS) by working closely with the professional institutes to streamline processes and remove the barriers preventing staff from applying.

A part time, civil servant role as senior product owner and programme advisor to a major, cross Government IT Infrastructure programme. The Programme is delivering an IT Desktop and Infrastructure service to meet the needs of a diverse and challenging set of Government Departments. They know that classically managed IT programmes struggle to succeed and aspire to be applying agile techniques in a traditionally non-agile context. Because of my experience doing similar things in the past, I have been asked to provide non-executive support and consultancy to the programme team, and to act as the senior Product Owner; responsible for ensuring that the sets of requirements and features being delivered in each release are the right ones for Government. I have proposed a priority and risk based delivery model that draws on agile techniques and principles and will deliver a programme delivery roadmap that is much more focussed on maximising customer value and minimising risk than classic waterfall delivery.

Deputy Head of Profession for Technology. A senior technology role responsible for the software engineering, telecommunications, systems engineering, applied research, IT infrastructure engineering, quality, requirements and senior technical manager professions, a community of almost 1000 engineers. Responsible for defining and implementing strategies for recruitment, induction, promotion and workforce capability. Developing and improving relationships with IET and BCS, including negotiating new processes for simplifying professional registration and strengthening our internal processes to allow them to be assured for CITP. Developing and implementing processes for technical recruitment, induction, development and promotion. Establishing a new Higher Apprenticeship scheme and negotiating with recruitment and other stakeholders to ensure the quality of the Engineering component is strong enough.

Senior User for a major uk government outsourcing contract. Responsible for improving the performance of strategically important contract that was suffering from quality and customer satisfaction issues. Conducted root cause analysis to create a principles driven maturity model that described a to-be vision and change path. Collaborated with supplier solution architects to co-design an innovative commodity infrastructure service using agile principles and design patterns that proved infrastructure provisioning times could be reduced from months to less than 24 hours. As a result, set requirements and evaluated 3rd party commercial tenders for a private cloud procurement contract.Defined Engineering conditions for contract renegotiation; Created and communicating a new model for contract Governance based on a Intelligent Customer Function;

A part-time role alongside other responsibilities. Responsible for a complete redesign of the software profession (of over 300 engineers), and used an innovative approach based on the industry standard SFIA framework. Created a combination of 4 roles and 6 grades that provide a balance of jobholder motivation and organisational job design. A experienced senior technical interviewer for recruitment and promotion events, including interviewing against the highest levels of UK-Spec and SFIA. Wrote competency interpretation guidance for the community. Skills Champion for Iterative Product Delivery and an experienced Agile practitioner, including applying Agile principles to non-software problems. Deputised for Head of Software Engineering as required.

Responsible for the management and leadership of an important product centre of 70 staff and contractors, in 7 teams, developing a portfolio of 20 complex software products for business critical outcomes. Led the change from a previous, project centric approach to a product centre governance, including establishing new processes and building a community around the new 'product centre' construct. Responsible for recruitment, promotion, development and disciplinary matters for staff and contractors and part of the senior management team for the overarching business unit.

Technical Team Lead for a near-real time, complex and business critical software product. Introduced Agile practices to the team and led solution architecture for a new product innovation.

PRINCE 2 Project Manager and Solution Architect, responsible for the design, development and delivery of a new near-real time processing system and the associated business change required. Managed a capital budget of AU$500k, a full time project team of up to 7 and reporting to Director level. Led a multi-national team of up to 7 staff and contractors to deliver a system that was geographically distributed over 3 locations and had challenging latency and near-real time aspects. In addition to software development in C++, Java, JEE and Sybase the development required consideration of networking, support, training, IT infrastructure and the decommissioning of a legacy system.

C++ and Java development for telecommunications systems.

VHDL development and C++ device driver development for telecommunications systems.

IET and BCS accredited graduate fast-track development scheme in the UK Civil Service. Included management, leadership and technical training. Work placements included hardware and firmware development, engineering management and business operations.

Applied research into telecommunications and real-time hardware processing. Developed prototype circuit boards for real-time telecoms applications including schematic board design up to 8 layers and VHDL firmware design.

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Summer student in the power systems division of Scottish Telecom. Various duties including investigations into sync problems with Cray multiplexers, troubleshooting power line telemetry systems, backups of mainframes.