Candidate Name:
Job Applied For:
Availability:
Key Skills:
Mark
Scrum Master / Agile Coach / Agile Project Manager
Interview: Immediate
Start: June
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Salary:
Presented By:
Certified Scrum Master and PRINCE trained project manager with
strong experience of implementing agile development techniques,
latterly in Energy Trading, Publishing, digital media and
Government.
Introduced agile techniques at Tornado, Zenith, John Brown,
Sapient, Globalbeach and Elsevier.
10 years financial experience in banking, insurance and market
feed.
Pragmatic and DCF qualified account holder managing a labour
budget of £2M at Tornado Group.
Effective and efficient in recruiting, building, managing and
mentoring teams, working in lock-step with Competitive & HR
strategy: speaks the language of business in the C-Suite, designers
in the studio and techies in the development department.
Creative facilitator skilled in delivering successful project results.
Creator of Wicked-Agile™ methodology that incorporates strategy,
design thinking and behaviour driven development.
£ Contract Day / Hourly Rates - negotiable
James Money j.money@ninesharp.co.uk – 01628 771811
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
Mark
PROFILE:
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Certified Scrum Master and PRINCE trained project manager with strong experience of implementing
agile development techniques, latterly in Energy Trading, Publishing, digital media and Government.
Introduced agile techniques at Tornado, Zenith, John Brown, Sapient, Globalbeach and Elsevier.
10 years financial experience in banking, insurance and market feed.
Pragmatic and DCF qualified account holder managing a labour budget of £2M at Tornado Group.
Effective and efficient in recruiting, building, managing and mentoring teams, working in lock-step with
Competitive & HR strategy: speaks the language of business in the C-Suite, designers in the studio and
techies in the development department.
Creative facilitator skilled in delivering successful project results.
Creator of Wicked-Agile™ methodology that incorporates strategy, design thinking and behaviour
driven development.
EDUCATION:
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MBA (Open) 2011
Post Grad. Certificate in Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge Management (Open 2011)
Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (Open 2009)
BSc Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (Edinburgh 1984)
VOCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS:
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Certified Scrum Master (2008)
Member British Computing Society (since 2002)
Member of Association for Project Management (1988 – 2006)
Ex Territorial Army [REME] (1987-89)
WORK EXPERIENCE:
Since 2001 – Present: Zakobyte Consulting Ltd - Principal Consultant
Assignments:
Comscientia
Principal Consultant
1992 – Present
I have proven techniques and measurements that assist in easing the pains of distributed development.
Building on firm foundations my coaching skills deliver lean practices for knowledge workers that improve
productivity.
I assist client clients in selecting best practice(s) for varied contexts and implementing process changes to build
software better, faster and cheaper. Normally clients want agile or lean practices but there are other
approaches that may be more applicable such as: design thinking, buffalo method and systems thinking to
name three. These methods can stand by themselves but also offer opportunity to blend better
communication and understanding into development.
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
My main interests lie in: strategic alignment of technology with business needs, facilitation of teams and the
development of tools to provide knowledge era metrics such as: flow, competency and conversion of knowhow to intangibles to cash in the bank. A simple example in alpha test is at http://flowgnosis.appspot.com.
Statoil ASA
Scrum Master/Coach
Role:
Oct 12 – May 13
Facilitate agile practices in an Energy Trading Risk Management application lifecycle team.
The team of 8 that I managed in London was responsible for the day to day running of Endur Front and Back
Office applications supporting trading operations in London and America. Middle Office support was handled
by a team in Stavanger and First Line support was performed by a team in Trondheim until 3 p.m. every day –
when the London team took over. I implemented Scrumban to reflect the mixture of project and maintenance
work
The London team was described as “difficult” and “dysfunctional” by several colleagues during my induction in
Norway. Their performance was consistently lower than their Scandinavian co-workers.
The main projects during my tenure were: Dodd Frank compliance, Renewable certificates and introduction of
a French tolling project.
Responsibilities:
Team based
Implemented scrum rituals: sprint planning, product review, sprint retrospective and daily stand-ups. I also
introduced backlog grooming to comply with the corporate Delivery Model.
Implemented agile coaching elements: A3 experiments and Code Dojos. A significant outcome of one dojo
designed to facilitate pair programming and TDD was the first automated tests to be run on Endur inside
Statoil. In my experience teams improve their working ways to best practice if they feel ownership of the
processes. I facilitate that by establishing the bounds and helping them devise processes to meet the strategic
needs.
My team supported the Front and Back office. I liaised extensively with teams
in Stavanger (Mid Office) and Trondheim (Support) to ensure smooth delivery
of the work. We ran a hybrid ITIL/Agile process that was very manual.
As part of the sprint planning I used the flipside of the Scrumban board to draw
up time lined PERT diagrams covering the sprint duration. This was not Agile by
the book but very useful in creating better estimates and a shared mental
model that was more informative than the list based sprint backlog.
The reported output of the team from rose from 97 story points 280 story points per sprint during my
assignment.
Responsibilities: Inter Teams
The team had two product owners: One in London (Projects) and one in Trondheim (Ops and Maint). To
accommodate committed delivery and urgent fixes I implemented Scrumban.
Participated and facilitated distributed agile rituals of Scrum of Scrums, Architectural Reviews and Scrum cafes.
Prepared and facilitated a cross cultural workshop to explore differences in working practices between Norway
and Britain using Hofstede and Ekvall techniques. One surprising outcome was that the members of the London
team had difficulty in realising that playfulness and freedom are dimensions to create good work
environments.
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
After 3 months coaching I re-measured the London team and detected a change for the better.
Having made a difference by increased productivity and facilitated a change in attitude I handed over to a
Statoil permanent staffer.
Reed Elsevier
Agile Coach/Scrum Master
Jan 12 – Jun 12
Value to client: Introduced and coached Agile in a multifunctional, multicultural environment.
Aligned technical effort to strategic requirements.
Validated knowledge transfer between global teams.
Responsibilities: Induct and facilitate two multifunctional scrum design teams.
Planned and ran workshops to explore and gather requirements and metrics.
Mentor teams, product owners and scrum masters in agile practices.
Improve stakeholder understanding.
Validated learning on Moodle running quizzes and forums.
Project Brief:
Design of a $45M Editorial Publishing System built on Oracle Fusion incorporating SOA, J2EE,
BPEM and XML Open Standards as well as proprietary components such as ADF, IM and
Portal. The design was passed offshore for build.
My first task was to complete the Requirements Analysis: To establish a prioritised product backlog split over
30 epics. I planned and facilitated user story workshops with 24 business representatives. Epics were processed
using a range of explorative techniques such as: 5 Whys, Fishbones, Force Field and Superheroes to determine
rank and business value. Given there was a collection of users when the design was starting then we collected
acceptance test criteria in cucumber style as well as Non Functional Requirements.
The output of the business workshops was used as input to the Release planning. Release planning was done
with client and offshore managers because it was used to set fixed price contracts.
To carry out the design work two multi-cultural, multifunctional design teams consisting of Elsevier and Wipro
employees as well as contract staff were established. The nationalities working in Amsterdam were: Indian,
Dutch, British, Portuguese, Irish, American, Japanese and French. Visa restrictions meant the Indian staff
rotated every 3 months.
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
To bring the teams together I prepared and ran induction courses covering cultural differences, team roles and
learning styles as well as scrum mechanics. The studious aspects were interspersed with a set of icebreakers
that helped remove the initial barriers and inhibitions. Afterwards the teams voted against a set of innovation
dimensions to set their environment.
Sprints adhered to the usual process rituals: sprint planning incorporating poker, daily stand ups, product show
and tell and sprint retrospectives. During retrospectives the teams would adjust the environment parameters
and remodel their work patterns to synchronize attribute delivery.
Sprint deliverables were: wireframes, wireflows, Oracle Fusion ADF screens, use cases and domain design
documents such as: packages, classes, BPM specs and sequence diagrams. The attributes were passed to Wipro
offshore development.
Each sprint delivered a show and tell of an ADF prototype to a set of 50 users in Amsterdam and globally over
webex. Feedback was taken and used to close any gaps in understanding. Sprint (process) retrospectives were
usually 1 hour in duration and were fluid due to practices that were emerging.
Following the team retrospectives I carried out technical stakeholder retrospectives with the infrastructure
architects, application architects and Wipro managers to ensure the designs met their individual and collective
needs.
To keep other stakeholders (board, testing and steering committee) aware of progress I produced a House of
Value to complement the weekly RAID reports. These were warmly welcomed as they showed a lot of
information that had not been previously available.
Having identified a major block in the transfer of knowledge from Amsterdam to Chennai I presented the case
for and established a Community of Practice: Quizzes on each of the sprint outputs were run and used to
ensure that the level of coder understanding was high enough prior to starting the build. The quizzes were
supported by forums to allow open communication building on the trust networks established during sprinting
and at the same time allow the contract management enough overview to remain in control.
Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities (Phase 1)
Nov 10 – Dec 11
Scrum Master
I was approached by an MBA colleague to provide conceptual, design and technical leadership for the UK Sea
Fisheries websites redevelopments as part of a six month restructuring of the core organisations to create the
Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities, under DEFRA sponsorship.
My main responsibilities were:
 Translate the C Suite requirements into a technical specification.
 Select the correct technical approach to provide long term maintainability.
 Lead, train and mentor three remote developers to produce the sites.
 Implement TDD using Selenium.
 Carry out regular site visits to ensure communications were kept on track.
 Manage the Risks, Issues and bugs – with solutions being logged in a knowledge base.
Due to the successful release of three web sites I was awarded a contract to implement advanced functionality
The sites were implemented in Joomla CMS. (http://sussex-ifca.gov.uk)
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
Sapient Nitro
May 2011- Aug 2011
Scrum Master/Digital Project Manager
I carried out two roles:
Scrum Master
Responsibilities: Created team spirit for a newly on-boarded team of 5 permanent and 6 contract staff working
on a 3 year multi-million pound bid for a large client. Over an eight day period I was responsible for knowledge
creation and transfer between the pairs in the team: developers, product owners, testers, QAs and Scrum
Masters. Read the notes.
I created and carried out the following workshops:
 Agile Overview
 Adaptability and Flexibility
 Front Page Design session
 TDD Code Dojo
 Cognition, team and national cultural differences
 Strategic considerations for successful agile scaling
I participated in the pitch to the client and then closed out the tender process with a retrospective, making
several strategic improvement recommendations.
I also ran daily stand ups and updated JIRA.
Technology: Java, JUnit, HttpUnit, MongoDB, Oracle
Based on the success of the above role I was offered the opportunity to be a:
Digital Project Manager
Responsibilities: Project Manage the digital aspects of rebranding of Ladbrokes.com
I managed the creative director, copy writer and graphic designer to produce innovative rich media, web pages,
mobile pages and mail. After modeling the value chain I applied Kanban to the creative process. Assets were
released on a flow basis rather than aggregate products to allow the client to learn the template process.
Implemented stakeholder analysis to provide an “other peoples’ shoes” appreciation of the clients’ pressures.
Houses of Parliament
Jan 10 – Oct 10
Lead Developer/Architect
My primary responsibility was development of the highest transactional system used in the Houses of
Parliament - the school visit booking system. The previous COTS legacy system was replaced with an ASP.NET
MVC, Fluent-NHibernate, JQuery, RESTful build that used the legacy database. Letter Printing was and MIS
reporting were handled by SSRS and integrated through the front end. New sophisticated functionality was
added while retaining the original look and feel to minimise user retraining. I supplied mentoring to several
teams in terms of LEAN and SCRUM techniques leading them to pragmatic implementations rather than blindly
following the book. I ran the project in a TDD fashion using Teamcity continuous integration and selenium for
unit testing.
Ascot Insurance
Scrum PM/Mentor
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Sep 09 – Dec 09
Fourth placement by same agent to manage the design and development of an asp.net augmentation
of the legacy underwriting system to fixed deadline.
Used Pivotal Tracker with Fibonacci estimations to manage the iterations during development and
Kanban during testing.
Applied parameterised beta distributions to location schedules to produce insurance pricing models for
US start-up operation of Lloyds syndicate.
Coached team in best practises for TDD, Continuous Integration, Domain Driven Design) and Agile
management.
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
C# 3.5, ASP.NET, GOF, EA & EI Patterns, NHIbernate, SQL Server, PivotalTracker
Novae Insurance
Aug 09
Third time placement by same agent: I identified the technical issues that stopped a Lloyd’s syndicate
automatically producing documents. The job was intended to run for two weeks but I resolved the problem by
lunchtime on day one. Essentially this was a re-referencing exercise to make the team think creatively to find
the solution to the problem.
John Brown Media
May 09 – June 09
Scrum Master (Hands on)
Development of a Content Management System (CMS) for a Premier League football club’s web portal.
Implemented Stand Ups and Moving Picture releases.
C#, ASP.NET 3.5, WCF, LINQ SQL Server 2008, Ajax, CSS, Google Web Services, Enterprise Patterns, TDD,
Subversion, Cruise Control
Electrical Contractors Association
Nov 08 - March 09
Scrum Master (Hands on – team of 6)
Implemented a web portal to manage 30,000 members and their professional insurance needs, including
claims. Used in-house tracker to measure personal velocity, rather than team. There are other ways of
measurement that increase morale. Carried out poker estimation sessions with the team.
Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008, C# 3.5, WCF, SSBS, Linq, Castle Windsor, Rhino Mocks, Third Party
management, Agile process refinement, GOF & EA Patterns, TDD, Subversion, Cruise Control.
Wiring Up Youth Justice
March 08 – Oct 08
Agile Evangelist/Developer (Hands on)
Increased productivity by introducing SCRUM in development of new generation of case management system.
Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008, C# 3.5, WCF, WWF, Linq, XML, CSS, Ajax, JQuery, Enterprise Patterns, TDD,
Subversion, Cruise Control
Ace Insurance
Aug 07 – Feb 08
Agile Evangelist/Lead Developer of 4 (Hands on)
Implemented Daily Stand Ups for the team. Developed 3 web portal products with underwriting and claims
functionality: Directors and Officers, Marine and Pension Trust Liability.
C#, Ajax, JavaScript, XML, ASP.NET/SQL Server 2000, Nhibernate, Nant, NUnit, OnTime, Vault and Cruise
Control
Beazley plc
Jan 05 – Jun 07
Agile Team Leader of 4 (Hands on)
Developed insurance products for the company’s web portal and latterly led the technical maintenance team.
Implemented interface between underwriting and claims system for fiduciary and marine products. Led
planning poker, development and release iterations as well as ensuring Daily stand-ups were to the point.
C# (1 & 2), ASP.NET (1 & 2), SQL Server 2005, Rally, MS Project, NUnit, Perforce, TDD, Cruise Control, XML, SSIS
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
Global beach
Aug 04 – Dec 04
Agile Mentor/Architect
Architected .Net version of digital media replacement system and mentored developers in agile techniques
during build and deployment.
C#, SQL Server, NUnit, Fxcop, Visio, NCover.
Previous assignments:
Civil Aviation Authority Nov 03 – Jul 04
Zenith Optimedia Ltd. Feb 03 – Nov 03
Museek.com
Apr 01 – Feb 03
PaperX
Sep 00 – Mar 01
Tornado Group plc
Jul 99 – Jul 00
Zakobyte Ltd
1992 - 1999
Republic National Bank 98-99
FT.com
98
Reuters
95-98
Merrill Lynch
93-95
BT
93
London Underground 90-92
Scopec Ltd
1984 – 1991:
Rover Group
1989
Westland Helicopters Ltd.
1988
Atomic Energy Authority
1988
British Aerospace
1988
.Net Architect & mentor of 3
.Net Architect and analyst
Java Developer
Head of Technology (J2EE) - Permanent
Head of Technology (Java) - Permanent
Project Mgt Developer– Assignments:
Java Developer
Implemented FT.com
Java Developer
VB Developer
Project Mgt Developer
Project Mgt Developer
Project Mgt Developer – Assignments: - Permanent
Project Mgt Developer
Project Mgt Developer
Project Mgt Developer
Project Mgt Developer
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
Technical skill summary (Durations are in years unless otherwise stated):
Design Methodologies:
SSADM
19
Languages:
C# 3.5
2
UML
OOA/OOD
13
13
C# 2.0
C# 1.1
2
4
Design Patterns (GOF)
Enterprise Integration Patterns
13
4
Visual Basic
Java
12
8
PERL/Scripting
HTML & Javascript
15
9
13
7
Enterprise Application Architecture
Booch
5
2
CORBA
Refactoring
1
13
XML
Python
Generic Web Services
WWF, WCF
12
2
CSS
Ajax
Adobe Air/Flex
Databases:
SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2005
SQL Server (Total)
T-SQL
Oracle
Access
IDEs & Source control
Visual Studio
Eclipse
Subversion
Perforce
Sourcegear vault
1
4
14
10
12
7
Project Management
PERT/PRINCE
Mentoring
ITIL
Agile
RUP
SCRUM
10
8
1
1
1
Deployment
Cruise control
Nant
TDD
NUnit
NCover
1
1
3 months
References are available on request
ninesharp Ltd, 18 Forlease Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 1RU
Tel: 01628 771811 Fax: 01628 632729 Email: contact@ninesharp.co.uk Web: www.ninesharp.co.uk
20
10
2
13
5
4
4
3
8
4
1