Kingston University

Head of Agile Delivery at iTech Media

London, England, United Kingdom

iTech is a hyper-scaling tech business.

My role is to drive scale and growth the organisation, going from 130 to now over 400 to deliver and create the incredible media products. My focus is to help shape 'How we work', building the structures and frameworks that enable us to do our best work.

-  𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 🔥
-  Developing programmes to develop and enable people, Leadership Academy, Arcademy, Accelerator and onboarding weeks
-  Organisational design and framework, building our strengths and capabilities
-  Collaborating with People Teams to help plan, scale and drive growth and capacity

-  𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 📈
-  Establishing and developing a strategic OKR framework to guide the company to its goals
-  Bringing world class collaboration and communication tool to bring us all together, pandemic be damned!
-  Coaching and mentoring senior leaders and building out long term investments in platform, people and tech

-  𝗮 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 🤘
-  Creating a competency framework and growth map to build next generation of Delivery capabilities
-  Growing from 8 to 21 (and counting!) amazing Delivery people
-  Coaching and mentoring in the company, to create a culture of business agility

iTech Media

Head of Agile Delivery

Reporting to the CEO, Sporting Group was acquired by FDJ in early 2019 and my focus was to help plan out the next  stage of growth and strengthen the product delivery function, setting up for a 📈 2020.

-  Working with SLT / Exec group to develop vision, mission and objectives for both B2B and B2C products
-  Built out the 2020 budget and forecast for next stage of growth, designing the technology org and roadmap to building the business case.-
-  Developing new product development framework and governance process
-  Hired and built a core delivery team, business analysts and defining a clear competency and growth framework

Sporting Group

Head of Delivery

Working across News UK's Core Platforms programme, covering Access, Identity Management and Subscription & Payment services used across the News UK portfolio, including The Sun, The Times, Wireless, Talksport and TES.

-  𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲, 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 🔢
-  Develop strategy and alignment across multiple publications, taking senior and exec leadership on the journey to tackle near term and long term threats to the media industry through world class technology platforms
-  Identified opportunities for scale and savings across the group, utilising new technologies to help leverage data to create
-  Delivering growth and new capability for The Sun, The Times and Wireless products, building new customer opportunities and inspiring partner titles across the globe


-  𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 🏆
-  Established new frameworks, methodologies and operating models with a team of over 100
-  Set up new office, creating an environment and culture outside of News UK to enable greater creativity
-  Building processes and tooling for operational excellence across the group, massively improving RTO and RPO across the group
-  Transitioned the team to new operating model to improve business outcomes and create a culture of 'can-do' and experimentation

-  𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 👩‍💻
-  Building an exploratory team, to pioneer and showcase 'the art of the possible'
-  Experimentation of customer journey with paywalls, payments, login & identity

News UK

Head of Delivery - Core Platforms

Working across The Sun digital portfolio, from web to apps to off-platform and CMS & platform services working side by side with editorial, commercial and marketing business units to create 'one team' agile culture. Playing a key role in The Sun becoming the UK's number one commercial news-brand (Comscore, April 2018- 31.7m visitors). ✅

-  𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡, 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 🚀
-  Scaled the Sun portfolio from 30 to 130~ people from multiple disciplines across multiple timezones, with a capex responsibility of over £10 million
-  Establishing and pioneering ways of working, cascading across the rest of the News UK portfolio
-  Finding and building talent to create an incredible team, building out an incredible culture and capability
-  Ensured operational excellence, ensuring a 24/7/365 product offering delivering over 600 pieces of news media every single day

-  𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 💎
-  Rebuilt The Sun tech stack, utilising design-lead thinking to increase our performance and reach
-  Using new tech within News UK, headless CMS (Wordpress), React, Node and Akamai, leading the way in rebuilding for a modern capability
-  Scoped, defined, delivered and evolved the new The Sun mobile app, creating award winning new experiences

-  𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐔𝐊 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 🤹‍♀️
-  Developing talent, through an Agile Academy a pioneering talent development programme, bringing
-  Establishing an Agile Community of Practice across the technology org, levelling up our Agile knowledge and product delivery capability
-  Creating partnerships with talent partners, creating events and raising the profile of News UK Tech
-  Coaching, mentoring and driving change across the organisation and news rooms at all levels

Head of Delivery - The Sun

As Programme Lead, my responsibility spanned across all Data Technology projects within the FT. Focusing on platform, API first driven projects to meet over a dozen distinct customer needs.

In 2016 I lead the programme to refresh it's relationship with the rest of FT and our customers, moving into a constant team based approach to build consistency and transparency with out customers. This in turn lead to increased value derived from Data Technology projects, better communications and understanding of our customer needs and a stronger reputation within the platforms group.

-  Lead work for 30 staff, a mixture of Developers, BAs, Architects and QAs within the programme across three time zones (London, Manilla and Bangalore)
-  Managed a £1 million + budget, on target with no overspend.
-  Promoted and delivered dramatic change and growth to working methods within the programme to an Agile, team based approach with customers at the heart
-  Managed multiple third party relationships for one off and on-going engagements
-  Maintained road map, resource plan, reports and updates to senior stakeholder groups

Financial Times

Programme Lead - Data Technology

As Senior Project Manager / Scrum Master, working within the Membership programme most recently focusing on initiatives on entitlement management, customer support and login and credential management.

In 2015, managed several large teams rebuilding the entitlement and login platforms for <a href="http://FT.com">FT.com</a> working across the entire FT Technology team to deliver high value services and applications within tight time frames.

-  Focus on identifying and delivering incremental value through the project life cycle
-  Working with stakeholders within FT and 3rd parties to on board to new platform
-  Set standards of working methods with other areas of the business, marketing, sales and customer services to drive all teams behind one goal and enable end to end delivery
-  Built functionality and migrated over 750,000 end users with a vast array of requirements within 9 months, while also delivering incremental value throughout the project

Also help drive the Agile community within the FT, sharing knowledge and ideas for Agile practices. Working with various disciplines to focus on improvements in process, delivery, standards as well as conflict management, stakeholder engagement, resourcing profiles and quantitative measurement.

Senior Project Manager

At the Financial Times I work for the Membership Programme which delivers initiatives in payments, login, identity and related supporting services for <a href="http://FT.com">FT.com</a>. Here I am Scrum Master for 2-3 teams of varying Agile maturity and have worked on a variety of projects and initiatives, from delivery of new digital products, social login and access to re-platforming and PCI readiness

- Mentor, develop and coach individuals and teams from different disciplines (developers, BAs, SMs, POs) with both metric driven and more group led methods on both 1-2-1 and group basis

- Work with POs and stakeholders to ensure clear communication and set expectations on delivery and onboarding

- Working with teams and business to establish clear agreed values and measurements for new initiatives to invest in with clear measurements and goals

- Building roadmaps, plans and strategies at both team and programme level, managing risk, cross programme dependencies and third party relationships (including on-going review and onboarding/TDD)

- Acting as PO on smaller initiatives and helping teams and stakeholders prioritise to deliver the right incremental value

Agile Project Manager / Scrum Master

Scrum master for up to 4 teams across the Business Support System (BSS) engineering team, working on utilising scrum best practice to enable teams to achieve more across a variety of projects. (eg infrastructure replacement, billing system replacement, new data warehouse, data cleansing).

Delivered training and coaching to enable the business to transition to Agile development framework to all areas of the business, developing processes to have full end to end project management from 'idea' to post deployment live support.

Ownership and driving force behind company wide improvement on Agile process, through workshops, training, mentoring and feedback cycles across all areas of the business. Emphasis on company wide involvement in Agile process and evangelising best practice to deliver good quality software through to production.

-  Scrum evangelist both at team and company level
-  Reporting status and metrics up to exec level
-  Vendor management
-  Creative problem solving and blocker removal
-  Release management
-  Process development and documentation
-  Management and team leadership
-  Driving Scrum and Agile across the business

mBlox

Scrum Master

Worked as part the project team to bridge the gap between development and operations to bring in projects successfully and ensuring smooth deployment for both end customers and internal teams.

My first assignment were projects with AT&T and Verizon to build new PSMS payment verification technology, this was done on a very tight timeline with very strict compliance requirements.

Additionally, I worked on transitioning the company from a traditional Waterfall methodology to an Scrum / Kanban methodology.

Project Implementation Engineer

Managing a support team for a telecommunications company with a customer base in the tens of thousands.

- Policy and process development
- Technical support to level 3
- Project Management
- Statistical reporting
- Capacity and Priority planning
- Quality checking

Digital Mail Limited

dmClub and OffNetOps Manager

Oversaw the new design and development of LMC's web presence. This was completely from scratch, ditching their old website and incorporating a completely integrated web shop and catalogue system, blog and design.

Assisted in development of internal processes to control, update and manage these systems and eventually moved onto web sales.

LMC Audio Systems Ltd

Web sales and development

Testing and maintaining stability of technical systems
Operating and overseeing batch processes of large data sets
Working with partner companies and customers to set data deliverables according to agreed timetables

Nick Walker

Nick Walker