Ian Rees

Ian Rees

I am an Agile Coach with several years’ experience of applying and coaching Agile and Lean principles. I have provided coaching at Enterprise, Programme and Team level on Agile transformation programmes in Life and General Insurance, financial services and banking sectors. 

I am a certified TBR trainer (Training from the Back of the Room) and Barefoot Coaching trained in Business & Personal Coaching

In 2002 I co-founded a successful software product company to meet the emerging market need for managing large scale mobile device deployments.  After developing a prototype to achieve seed funding and two DTI Research Grants, I was searching for ways to organize the development work to release valuable features more quickly, to support cash flow and ROI expectations of investors.  I introduced and led the adoption of eXtreme Programming (XP) to deliver the first product for which we were granted UK and European patents for a recovery system for portable data processing apparatus.

As new people joined the software development team I started to learn about the Scrum framework.  I introduced Scrum to B2M Solutions, starting with one co-located Scrum Team. I trained the Development team in Scrum and balanced my role as Scrum Master 50% with being part of the Development team.  We delivered our next release in three increments working in 4-week Sprints. We experimented with Sprint length and found that two-week Sprints gave us the appropriate balance of focus and ability to respond to changing needs and we delivered valuable features in each Sprint. As the team grew further, I became a full time Scrum Master.

For a while I balanced the role of Scrum Master for one team with that of a Product Owner for another team. As Product Owner, I worked closely with two of our major customers to maintain a common Product Backlog that met their needs and avoided developing bespoke solutions for each.  Eventually a full-time Product Manager joined who I trained as a Product Owner for the Scrum team. I became a CSM in 2011.

Through application of automation we moved to continuous delivery for the in-premise product and to continuous deployment for our cloud-based enterprise mobile analytics service. This was all done using the Scrum framework, working in two-week Sprints.

In 2014 I left my company, to follow my desire to coach on a larger scale and apply Agile and Scrum in a large-scale transformation. As a freelance Agile Coach, I joined the Agile transformation programme at Aviva where I taught, mentored and coached at Enterprise, Programme and Team level. I trained and supported understanding of Agile principles and the adoption of Scrum. This included developing and coaching internal Agile coaches and Scrum Masters in the UK. I also provided role specific training for Scrum Masters, Product Owners and the Development team and created customized and bespoke training on Kanban and Scrum practices.  I also worked closely with the Executive and Investment Committee in transforming its gating and investment governance model to an Agile approach.

In 2015 I joined the Agile Enablement Program at American Express as an Agile Coach where I coached leadership teams in applying visual portfolio management to manage the portfolio funnel and to make informed decisions on funding. I coached a new team adopting Scrum for the 'Know Your customer (KYC)’ program.  This involved coaching teams through the stages of team formation to become a self-organized team requiring less direction operating within the Scrum framework. 

In 2015 I re-joined Aviva to work on the large scale Agile transformation of the merged Friends Life and Aviva companies. As lead Agile Coach, working closely with the Agile Transformation Lead, I worked at team, programme and leadership level to enable business agility.  I created and delivered hundreds of hours of Agile Overview, Scrum and Scrum role training courses

Since February 2017 I have been working as an enterprise Lean-Agile Coach on a pan-bank transformation at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to improve the experience of customers.  Working with teams and platform leadership to organize the work and the people to optimize for customer journeys.  Introducing Agile and Lean principles to operational and development value streams to deliver value quicker. I am coaching and mentoring Scrum Masters and leadership teams in principles and practices to develop the overall capability of the platform to deliver the right outcomes faster.