Catherine Pratt

Catherine Pratt

Catherine is an outstanding scrum master and senior business/technical analyst with over 10 years of experience. An IBM Consulting background coupled with an excellent reputation and proven success in requirements elicitation, process modelling and team management in an Agile/SRCUM environment.  Catherine thrives in an organisation that is dynamic and target driven with a desire to deliver to a high quality within aggressive deadlines.

Catherine is certified in UML, proficient in BPMN, and is practised in all aspects of Business Analysis.   Catherine has proven experience in both public and private sectors, and successful delivery of IS projects using different methodologies including Waterfall, RUP, IBM Method and Agile methodology.  Catherine's analysis skill set is set is complemented with project management and scrum master experience and Prince2 Practitioner certification.

Personal Statement

I started my career as an IBM graduate learning all aspects of project delivery: coding, testing, analysis and PM-ing.  This was back in the day before the move to agile delivery.  IBM provided me with the opportunity to get to grips with key analysis techniques and project management skills.  I left IBM as a qualified BA and PM.

I then took a position working with Centrica.  My work and training at Centrica enabled me to discover and embrace the agile principles and SCRUM delivery.  I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that was positioned to roll out agile and SCRUM within our business area.  This exposed me to the issues that arise when a traditional waterfall business moves across to agile practices.  It also allowed me to experience first hand, ways to handle the resistance to agile.  It provided me with invaluable experience in working in an immature agile environment that had plenty of room for improvement.  For me this is the most useful experience possible, working in an environment where everything is set up perfectly is great but it doesn’t necessarily allow you to understand WHY some things are successful and others less so.

I moved from Centrica to Sky where the agile implementation is quite mature with pair programming a foregone conclusion, scrum boards visible and most teams working well within the agile set up.  The main challenges here were scalability within a programme of work or business unit, the use of electronic scrumboards and looking at news ways of working such as KANBAN.  Again, working in an environment that is looking to improve is the best way of learning.  There were some things we did well and some things which progressed with an iterative approach learning from trial and error. 

After Sky I moved back into the utilities industry working in a company that was more waterfall and process orientated than I ever realised was possible.  Within about 24 hours I knew I had to get back into an agile environment.  Having my hands tied due to process and spending months creating an reviewing requirements specs was sole destroying.  It re-affirmed my thinking that agile when done properly has so much to offer.

I am now back in an agile environment.  I have had the opportunity to bring across some of the learnings from my previous experiences and have bought with me knowledge and good practices that I have seen to be successful.  I have led the way in addressing inter-scrum dependencies within programmes of work and I am continuing to drive programme level backlog shaping and grooming.

The next step on the ladder for me is to expand on my programme management skill set by understanding the more traditional approaches and how these can be incorporated with the experiences I have had to date with managing multiple agile teams.  I am also keen to see how scaled agile progresses and will look to keep up to date with new ideas in this area.