Personal Profile:

Areas of Expertise:

• Software Engineering Excellence (Technical, Process & Innovation) • Managing large scale Agile and scrum adoption • Managing cross functional software engineering depts. • Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Functional • Elastic Cloud Computing • Design for Lean Six Sigma Black Belt • Trans-continental software development & Off-shoring • Globalisation, Translation & Localisation of software products • Software Reliability Engineering • Embedded Software Development in C++, assembler • ReSTful API Design / support • Application Development in HTML5, JS, C++, Java… • Domain Driven Design • Technology / Architecture Cost Analysis • Agile Project Management / Impact Mapping • Product Design, User Interface Design & Development • Embedded Software Development in C++, assembler • Product Owner & Certified Scrum Master • Application Development in HTML5, JS, C++, Java… • Team Creation & Optimisation • Technology / Architecture Cost Analysis • Head of Department / Team Leadership (100+ People) • Micro services architecture

Contact:

agile4business@gmail.com

uk.linkedin.com/in/scottpotteruk

Scott Potter MSc Soft Dev

Software Engineering Lean & Agile Coach

Business Transformation Head of Department

Certified ScrumMaster Lean Six Sigma Black Belt

FA Qualified Coach

- I am experienced in a wide range of software development activities including programming, design, architecture, team management (sizes from 10 – 200 people), project management, department set up and cultural change across industries such as media, safety critical, digital printing and information management systems.

- Have managed Operational Budgets of £3M & Capital Budget of £7M

- I focus on Business Agility & achieving successful business outcomes: Recent proven experience delivering software quality improvements, agile transformations, staff retention programmes and delivery of digital media websites, tablet apps and back end services. I specialise in agile adoption at small & large scale.

- I am educated to MSc level and the holder of 11 patents in electro-mechanical, process controls and software.

- I prefer using an inclusive management style to utilise the strengths of everyone. I strive for efficiency and am passionate about delivering high quality software, with a focus on accelerating the flow of real value to the client. Always keen to learn new skills. Studied for MSc part time whilst employed in a demanding full time job and nurturing a young family.

- I am comfortable coaching C-level stakeholders in the important subtleties of Agile Software Development, how to support it and what it provides them with.

- My Black Belt qualification was an 18 month programme, not a 3 days

course.

Recent Deliveries

I have been responsible for the end-to-end creation and deployment of products, tools & services for some of the UK’s best-known brands. Highlights:

The Times Tablet App The highest grossing (non-game) app in the Apple UK store

Sun Goals Top 5 downloaded sports apps in the UK

New Sun Tablet App A new reading experience

High Transaction Access Control System Services up to 5 Million requests per hour for protected content

thesun.co.uk The fastest responsive news site in the UK

Template Designer Successful editorial tool for Digital media

The new Times & Sunday Times Digital Android, iOS, Website (Beta Jan 2016)

Other Notable Achievements

Created a Software Engineering competency / department

Created & Developed Career Frameworks and personal development plans

Collaborated with HR to change progression, promotion and personal objective setting policy to support agile values

Designed development programmes with both internal L&D team and external trainers

Implemented a Continuous Delivery, DevOps culture and mature software engineering practices across all teams. Average improvements of 400% delivery frequency

Substantial improvements in staff retention

Developed a PID temperature control system for leading-edge fusing technology on a shared Renesas SH2 processor (that specialist

system modellers had categorically stated could not meet the control stability that I achieved)

Turned around a failing iOS & Android flagship product development which now achieves 99.6% crash free users.

Employment History: Equal Experts / HMRC

Delivery Leadership Joined the multi-award winning Equal Experts - HMRC Digital team to deliver the £1.3B Pound Making Tax

Digital programme: - A more hands-on role with the Self Assessment and VAT API teams. Responsible for software

delivery and mentoring of HMRC staff in Agile Development & Delivery methods. Equal Experts's MDTP provides the core capabilities for Technical Agility pillar of my Engineering Excellence for Business Agility model.

Other core responsibilities for Resourcing, recruiting, sw design guidance, Kanban and scrum based project management within a wider programme that was not based on agile project management or agile software delivery principles. Working with ReSTful API design, Domain Driven Design, Scala & Play framework. Scrum teams consist of User Research, Ux / Service Design, PO, BA, Architecture & sw engineering as part of the GDS framework.

Value Flow Solutions ltd

Consulting and hands-on delivery with Lean & Agile principles and practices.

Founder & Managing Director

Set up VFS for Consulting and hands-on design & delivery

News UK News UK Tech define & develop digital publishing products for iconic media brands reaching 30 million people per week.

Head of Digital Engineering

Promoted into an expanded Head of dept. role, now including shared services, systems engineering, Build & Config, the previously separately managed QA team & the previous Director of Engineering role.

47 Permanent Staff & approx. 50 contract staff & selected agencies. - At its peak size, I was accountable for the timeliness and quality of approximately 200 people.

Reorganised the department to ensure that each team’s output was aligned with a real-world customer or user and therefore they could deliver real business value.

Accountable for and proud to have developed, enhanced & maintained a multitude of News UK’s Digital offerings and the backend supporting services.

Introduced a career framework, training programmes and a core set of values to guide our priorities.

Introduced the Engineering Excellence model, which includes my 3 Pillar Business Agility components and fully supports DevOps adoptions.

Engineering & Architecture strategy and process improvement roadmap.

Software development based on xP, Agile Project Management based on Scrum, with the objective of providing sustainable, high quality output from productive teams.

Set up the technical aspects of partner framework (Guidance & Governance framework)

Created a culture of quality, continuous improvement, Learning & development, teamwork, incremental delivery. Achieved significant, measurable improvements.

I transformed this dept. into a sound & stable capability. Tech includes: AWS with Cloud Formation, Dynamo DB, RDS, SMS etc; Java, Groovy, Node.js, HTML & JS with Angular, Backbone & SPAs; Android, Objective C, Swift; OOD and functional; CMSs – Escenic, Wordpress; Micro services, Graph databases, Apache, Akamai. Experiments with Typescript, React JS, AWS Lambda and more.

News International Engineering Delivery Manager

Working with fellow EDMs and the Head of Digital Engineering to transform NI Tech from a project based development organisation into a capacity model with fixed / stable teams.

Staffing and budgeting of cross functional scrum teams;

Instilling engineering disciplines and mentoring;

Line managing permanent staff. Technologies: Akamai edge caching & net storage, Front end & Back end web technologies; Escenic CMS;

Jan 2012 – Feb 2013

Feb 2013 – Mar 2016

Mar 2016 – present

Mar 2016 – present

2011 HCL Senior Scrum Master, Agile Coach & Agile Project Management Coach

Leading a team of Scrum Masters / DfLSS Blackbelts to transform the organisation to apply Scrum principles.

Continuous Improvement in place; scrum now the default practice: Prioritised product backlogs in place, sprint planning, customer collaboration, concise daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, demo’s and retrospectives take place. Improvement actions are tracked. The 7 Principles of Lean Software Development are observably practiced.

2010 Xerox Xerox is a document and multi-functional printer development company with 130,000 employees, in 160 countries. Senior Scrum Master

Responsible for the productivity of up to 50 co-located people (systems engineers, developers, business analysts, testers). Structured & co-ordinated 5 scrum teams in synchronised two-week sprints, pulling from a single backlog managed by a single PO.

Lead a team of Scrum Masters to transform the organisation to apply Scrum principles such as epic to task decomposition, planning poker, design patterns, TDD and backlog prioritisation. Themes, MMFs and Epics all used to manage the complexity.

The role also included coaching others to embrace agile approaches such as automated testing with behaviour driven development, and establishing fast feedback cycles.

Initial tasks involved setting up a new team, and an agile workspace.

Lead the transformation activity, coaching the senior leadership team throughout.

Key achievements include bringing those new to agile, scrum and lean up to speed and allaying their fears, splitting the jargon from the core concepts, and explained the focus on delivering value whilst enabling people to achieve greater, more relevant output. A measurable reduction in Work In Progress (WIP) and feature lead-time was observed.

Retained management responsibility for the GUI software team.

2009 Xerox Graphical User Interface Software Development Manager

Full project management accountability for both software and integration of electronics on a with multi-CPU electronics architecture running on Linux, with both Java and C++.

Scheduling the complete project & budget estimates for development and hardware resources.

Managed a team of developers and project managed offshore teams of developers, testers and SCM.

Identified as a DfLSS Black Belt candidate and began on course of training & development to be certified

Piloted scrum and practiced both scrum master and proxy product owner roles.

Set-up and decamped the local team constituent to an Agile workspace.

Retaining all responsibilities outlined below in my previous role

2008 Xerox Graphical User Interface Project Leader

Project managing the design, development and delivery of the GUI component of a larger project.

Managing the full delivery including use of burn-downs, retrospectives, sprint planning, EVM, risk analysis, issue management, find-fix rate assessment, reliability and integration FMEAs. (Agile PM within a larger phase-gate PMO).

Line managed a small team of onshore developers and project managed their offshore counterparts.

2007 Xerox Technical Specialist

Recognition of taking on more responsibilities than the previous role demanded.

Establishing unit testing practices in C++ subsystems using CppUnit.

Retaining all responsibilities outlined below in my previous role.

2002 Xerox Senior Software Engineer

Requirements elicitation & business analysis, software architecture, design & development.

Ownership of a real time embedded sub-system, using closed loop feed back and control algorithms.

Plan & manage priorities & resources of the sub system to ensure all stakeholders are supported and managed.

Skills include: OOD/OOA C++ & Visual C++, Control system thermal simulation, Hitachi sh2 assembler, PID control theory, Control system modelling, VxWorks OS, Rational Clearcase SCM tool, Artisan UML documentation.

1998 Xerox Software Engineer

Software architecture, design & development of real-time systems and touch screen UI modules using. Disciplined estimation, design & inspection methods and configuration management methods as part of a level 2 SPI organisation. Skills OOD/OOA C++, 68000 assembler, Access and Unix, Lauterbach Emulators. Early xP adoption and championed iterative and incremental practices.

1991 Xerox Design Engineer

From apprentice up to design engineer. Many positions held and experience accrued including: Lean Manufacturing; Systems engineering; Electro-mechanical design & development. R&D, iterative & incremental practices were pervasive.

Education: 2005 – 2010 Open University, MSc, Software Development (part-time)

Dissertation: A Feasibility Study into the Use of a Recurrent Neural Network to Predict Software Development Effort & Duration

1996 – 1998 Engineering Software HNC with Distinction Oaklands College; Borehamwood; Herts (11 Subjects – 8 Distinctions, 3 Merits)

1993 – 1996 Mechatronics (Software Control, Electronics, Mechanical Engineering Design) HND with Distinction

Oaklands College; Welwyn Garden City; (18 subjects – 16 Distinctions, 2 Merits)

References available on request.