Mark Wood

As a relatively recent convert to the world of Scrum it has become clearer to me over the past few years to me that this is a framework that can effectively deliver products to market more rapidly, it can get people working together much more effectively and even help repair personal and departmental relationships.

My exposure to Scrum started when I was part of the team that left Betfair.com to start up Tradefair.com (or LMAX.com as it is now known). We adopted a slightly more Thoughtworks based approach to Agile development and we made this part of the fabric of the business right from the start. It took a while to bed down, especially as we were building a huge, world beating trading exchange system from scratch. We had (and still have) some great people on the team such as Dave Farley and Martin Thompson who really pushed this approach and also the drive for continuous delivery with some fantastic results.

After LMAX I returned to Betfair where I helped the Poker team use Scrum (with bits of Thoughtworks terminology) to deliver a £3M+ customer facing product migration project, this was the first real Agile project delivered in Betfair. This proved a great physical and mental incentive for the senior technology management to embrace Scrum as the chosen product delivery methodology for Betfair and to help push the need to accept this change throughout the entire organisation.

I'm now the CTO at GlassesDirect and I've spent the past 18 months taking a failing team through to being a fully functioning and super effective delivery machine, building great solutions and a great delivery machine, with great people in it.

Bring on the next challenge!