K.N. Kukoyi

Public bio for K.N. Kukoyi

I'm the founder of Purposeful Group, and the author of 4 business books, including Don't Hire a Software Developer Until You Read this Book, a software survival guide for non-technical entrepreneurs entering the tech space who want to reduce the uncertainty associated to starting their business and for seed startups who require support and ideas when dealing with the daily realities of managing the software development process and getting a quality software application built and launched.

The book has achieved #1 best seller rankings on more than 10 Amazon Top 100 best seller lists world-wide including in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Brazil and Australia.

In addition to the CSM qualification, I have a Diploma in Coaching Excellence and a Diploma in Internet Marketing.

I have been working in agile development environments for over 11 years in the following roles:

* Agile business analyst

* Agile project manager

* Scrum master

* Agile trainer

* Product Owner

* Quality assurance (QA) / manual testing

* Agile coach.

Project budget sizes have ranged from £50,000 - over £5 million.

The duration of projects has ranged from several weeks to 5 years in length.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is not an exhaustive list, but outlines some of the major projects I have worked on including:

Delivery of a new 100+ user CMS (content management system) for journalists. Budget £3.4 million. A new Sky News web site designed and built from scratch and the upgrading of the feeds used to ‘syndicate’ Sky News content to radio stations and train stations from XML to JSON. 

Mortgage calculator, Mortgage affordability calculator and Stamp duty calculator. All 3 products were written in Ruby/Rails and were created for use by the general public. Budget - confidential. Duration, approx 8 months.

Financial advisor directory with advisor data provided by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). Budget - confidential. Duration - approximately 5 months. This was a high profile project. The directory, written in Ruby/Rails was requested by Government to be made available to the general public in time for the arrival of the pension reforms which happened in 2015. https://directory.moneyadviceservice.org.uk

Sales system. Budget - £5 million+. Positions – Business Analyst, Stream lead. This was a 4 year, multi-phase project including a ‘from scratch’ build of a new recruitment sales system used by 1500+ sales staff world-wide and written in PHP. This system was praised by City analysts on its release. This project required heavy liaison / consultancy with front-office, staff and management based around the world. The system interfaces with Siebel CRM. Other tasks - vendor / product selection process for the CRM system and the implementation partner selected to help integrate it. The project covered the entire project/software lifecycle from inception and requirements gathering & analysis through to design and user experience, unit, functional and system based testing, training and 1st/2nd line support following each major release, plus delivery of product demos and presentations and management of stakeholder communications.

Implementation of a new e-Learning system. Budget £1.5 million. Position – Project Manager. This was a seven month project to implement and customise a 3rd party system, the Kallidus LMS (Learning Management System) for the Learning and Development department training over a thousand members of staff based across North America, Europe and Australasia.

Commission payment system written in PHP. Budget - £1.5 million+. Position – Agile project manager / Agile/XP Coach. A two phase, 12 month project. I was asked to take on this project as it had failed twice previously. The system was delivered to Comps & Bens / Payroll.

Expenses and travel booking system. Budget - £1 million+. Position - Agile Project Manager. A project of 5 phases over 12 months enabling the roll-out of a multi-country/currency solution.

External website upgrades. I project managed the upgrades of several company owned external websites. During the same period I trained the whole On-Line team in the use of XP, its foundations and benefits, coaching them on the practical applications of XP through planning games, group meetings, user story writing sessions, iteration reviews / SCRUM retrospectives and through general instruction on a day-to-day basis as we worked through the project.

Career management system written in PHP. Budget - £70,000+. Position – Agile project manager. This system enabled staff to record their interests and preferences with regards to internal career opportunities world-wide.

Credit Risk system. Budget £50,000+. Position – Agile/XP Coach. Supporting a Finance PM, the Credit Control manager and a SAP BA new to Agile processes. I managed the Agile development process, the development teams and supported the abap/SAP team, who were also new to Agile methods, with the overall intention of delivering a tool to improve the management of financial risk group-wide.