Kelvin Lawrance

Kelvin Lawrance is an experienced and enthusiastic consultant in roles as Scrum Master or Agile Coach. Having spent many years in the development and delivery of software solutions across a broad range of sectors, he’s now a passionate evangelist for the benefits of Agile values and principles.

Although Kelvin had taken an iterative and Agile approach to development in the early days of his career as a developer at British Telecom's Research Laboratories when building prototypes for various applications, when his career progressed to project management a more traditional waterfall approach was adopted in line with BT’s own practices. Although never comfortable with the waste generated by the waterfal approach, Kelvin has always identified well with the challenges faced by software developers and as a project manager focused on any approach which helped a team deliver more efficiently.  After 10-15 years of traditional Project Management roles both within BT and smaller organisations Kelvin was introduced to Scrum during his time at Peabody in 2007 and immediately felt at ease with the Agile approach with its emphasis on experimentation, review and iterative improvement.

In 2010 Kelvin joined Strident as Development Manager and built an application development team with an Agile approach from the bottom up. The team delivered a number of client solutions using SharePoint and other technologies from the Microsoft stack.  As his experience grew he recognised the need for a broader knowledge base and started to research Scrum and other Agile methods in more detail. Whilst opportunities were limited to network face to face with other agile users in his geographic area, he took the opportunity to join various online agile communities and completed his first formal Scrum certification (PSM1) in 2012.

In 2013 Kelvin was contracted to KatchUp as ScrumMaster and helped the Java development team to make a series of successful application releases for desktop and mobile by implementing Scrum.  As a lean startup, KatchUp was able to experiment with various agile approaches and elements of Kanban were introduced once the application had been released and operational issues needed to be handled alongside ongoing development. After some experimentation with a traditional operations structure eventually an efficient DevOps environment was evolved making the most of automated tools for testing and continuous deployment. Whilst taking a short break after KatchUp, Kelvin completed his CSM certification.

Since the start of 2015, Kelvin has been working with two very different agile teams.  IJYI are a mature agile team which not only provide bespoke software development solutions using Scrum but also provide agile consultancy to other development teams as a Microsoft ALM partner. The team specialise in the use of the Microsoft toolset to support agile development. Kelvin is currently lead Agile Coach at IJYI.  

In contrast, the FairFX team were new to agile. FairFX is a foreign exchange business in the city of London and made a board level decision to move to an agile approach after software deliverables were running behind schedule. Kelvin was contracted to initially run a trial of Scrum with the web development team. The board were so impressed with the improvements seen after 8 weeks that Kelvin is now coaching the rest of the engineering team as they implement appropriate agile processes.

Kelvin completed his CSPO certification in July 2015 in order to better understand this particular role and provide an improved coaching service to Product Owners within the Scrum framework and was awarded his CSP credential in August 2015.

Kelvin regularly attends Scrum Alliance user group events in London and is now committed to organising events to encourage agile adoption in his local area via the Scrum Alliance East of England Agile User Group.