Mark Williams

For more years than I care to mention I’ve used traditional waterfall & gated methodologies to deliver projects and programmes.

Along the way I gained all the usual badges; PMP, Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) and PRINCE2 certified practitioner status.

I have been inspired by the internet and have worked primarily on digital projects. Here I started to see the very early stages of XP and Agile software development at Pearson Publishing / ft.com (2000-2001) and the Automobile Association / theaa.com (2005-2008).

Sometimes the most challenging of times can be a strong catalyst for change, as I found when struggling to deliver valuable features quickly enough at Old Mutual (2008-2010). However, I was working with a supplier using Agile Scrum, and it got me excited enough to undertake the Scrum Master Certification course (2009). I realised there was a far better way!

My first opportunity to use Scrum was on a 12-week strategy initiative, investigating the “as-is” state and defining the global five-year digital strategy for the insurance giant RSA (2010). The project was perfectly suited to week-long sprints; uncovering insights, inspecting and adapting as we progressed.

Initially, Agile often formed only a part of the portfolio of projects being delivered (e.g. Friends Provident 2010), but it was at Old Mutual in 2012 where I was given the opportunity to build a Scrum team in an otherwise gated and waterfall change organisation. A lone voice and Agile evangelist, I introduced the Scrum framework and built and coached the team. It soon made traction and gained supporters as we undertook pilot projects to prove we could successfully work and deliver in this way. As Delivery Lead, Coach and Scrum Master it was over a period of a further 12 months that we delivered a brand new client extranet (https://customer.skandia.co.uk) with many hundreds of features.  Along the way we adopted CI and TDD, and most recently BDD.

I am always keen to gain further and broader insights, I undertook the Certified Product Owner in 2013, joined the London Coaching Retreat in 2014 and attended the Global Scrum Gathering in Berlin. Gaining the Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) in November 2014. I recently participated in the Geneva Coaching Retreat (Oct 2016) and have formed the Agile Outside IT meetup group:https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Outside-IT/

My current passion is looking at how Agile principles can be applied to non-IT teams, and building organisations that harness the power of human intrinsic motivation and self-direction. With this topic in mind I am blogging: http://fractalwork.com

As an independent consultant, I am currently working as an Agile Practitioner and Coach at Barclays Bank within the Investment Bank (aligned to the PMO).