Daniel Cenizo
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Seville, Spain
Toptal member since September 6, 2023
Daniel has around 15 years of experience in Agile transformation and coaching for big companies, including six Fortune 500 organizations: Schneider Electric, Roche, Airbus, and Phillips 66. He is passionate about business process improvement and building high-performance tech teams through people-oriented leadership and excellent problem-solving skills. Daniel is also well-versed in scrum team building and performance management.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Confluence
- Jira
- Kanban
- Lean
- Miro
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Scrum
Work Experience
Agile Delivery Lead
Syngenta
- Delivered a 77% reduction in cycle time. Planning accuracy increased from 50% to 92.6%. Decreased the typical Production rollout timeframe from 2 years to under 6 months in 2025, and to 3 months in 2026.
- Contributed to quality: 72% reduction in the amount of bugs generated monthly. Increased code coverage from 69% to 92.1%.
- Ensured customer satisfaction: 97% NPS in the UI/UX usability survey.
Lead Scrum Master
T-Systems International
- Increased program revenue and customer satisfaction by enhancing quality, efficiency, and productivity within development teams.
- Rapidly built an offshore development team in India that delivered a new chatbot MVP in under three months, earning excellent customer feedback and securing additional funding for long-term development.
- Contributed to the program's expansion, with two additional teams following our strong performance in 2024.
Scrum Master
Schneider Electric
- Implemented the Scrum framework in several teams of Salesforce and Apex developers based in India and other stakeholders in Europe and the US.
- Reduced the amount of late issues by 100% using Jira's "wall of shame" dashboard.
- Improved team collaboration via communication and constant knowledge transfer.
SAFe Scrum Master
Roche
- Converted a group of remote developers of five different nationalities into a team leveraging the SAFe environment.
- Obtained excellent feedback from senior full-stack developers. One even mentioned that "a scrum master runs through his veins".
- Delivered an MVP to end users in six months with a new team.
Scrum Master
NatWest Group
- Implemented the Agile methodology to work in a data and analytics program, becoming the scrum master for two teams of seven and six developers.
- Got promoted to agility team leader at Talan Consulting, becoming line manager for five consultants.
- Received positive feedback from senior developers at NatWest Group.
Agile Coach
Paradigma Digital
- Coached the senior management team and scaled Agile all across the organization.
- Scored 9.5/10 in the Agile chapters of the proposal presented for the public contract with the Andalusian Health Service.
- Obtained excellent feedback from my work from the head of development.
Agile Coach
Airbus
- Collaborated successfully with Airbus, one of the world leaders in the aerospace industry. In 2019, the company ranked 123 on the Fortune Global 500 list.
- Coached the Airbus team that won the European Space Agency's Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission for Copernicus.
- Performed a successful Agile transformation for two different teams in the aerospace sector.
Scrum Master
Jaguar Land Rover
- Enabled digital transformation by unleashing solutions that included analytics, big data, process redesign, and robotic process automation (RPA).
- Conducted a customer-first project, reducing cost in shared services by identifying opportunities to remove waste and standardize, automate, and outsource workloads.
- Performed a management role at the biggest premium automotive company in the UK, part of Tata Motors, ranking 232 on the Fortune Global 500 list in 2018.
Agile Coach
Serco
- Led operational excellence through Lean and Agile methodologies.
- Enabled the certification of 25% of managers after delivering Agile and Lean Six Sigma training and coaching students to help managers complete the two mandatory improvement initiatives.
- Achieved cost reduction with the new compact one-day course created, allowing capacity release and travel costs reduction compared to the former two-day version.
Delivery Manager
Phillips 66
- Reduced costs by approximately $1 million by decreasing the slops or interfaces generated in the oil pipelines. This was achieved through the creation of a regression and optimization model.
- Delivered ten change and transformation projects per year by leading cross-functional teams with members from the finance, supply, IT, legal, and sales teams. This was achieved with a new "management of change" structure following a DMAIC cycle.
- Achieved 26 new certified yellow belts, almost 25% of the staff, by delivering Lean Six Sigma Yellow and Green Belt training and coaching and mentoring toward accreditation.
Project Manager
Celsa
- Achieved an annual £254,000 cost reduction by leading a black belt project to implement SMED for time reduction in changeovers. The project and methodology received excellent feedback from the directors' committee.
- Handled the creation of a new internal communication system for daily meetings that obtained the Investors In People Gold Award and was rated 4/5 in an employee satisfaction survey.
- Delivered business optimization projects and coaching in the Agile and Lean methodologies.
Business Analyst
Airbus
- Implemented a culture change towards Lean thinking in the organization, introducing practical problem solving, Kaizen, Kanban, visual management, and 5S.
- Trained staff to perceive Lean and its tools not as extra work but as a work philosophy.
- Handled objections and engaged with people to influence potential change resistors.
Project History
Heath Basic Data Application
Delivered the Heath Basic Data application to production with zero recorded bugs, resulting in a top-quality product with over 55,000 end users in nine months.
This project involved delivering a tailored, top-quality product for end users. I coached a team of two back-end and two front-end developers, one user-experience developer, one architect, one QA expert, and one PO stakeholder. After introducing XP practices for unit testing, the team increased the SonarQube code coverage from 20% to over 80%.
European Space Agency's LSTM Mission for Copernicus
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-11-airbus-wins-esas-lstm-temperature-check-mission-for-copernicus-nextCoached the team that won the European Space Agency's Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission for Copernicus.
This project involved coaching a team of around 20 people to help them embrace the Agile methodology and introduce new tools for project management. The trainees consisted of a distributed team of engineers from the UK and France.
Agile Transformation for Public Contract
http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/contratacion/document/download?refCode=2020-0000085490&refDoc=2020-0000085490-13Scored 9.5/10 in the Agile chapters of the proposal presented for the public contract with the Andalusian Health Service.
As part of a team of senior managers writing the proposal for the public contract with the Andalusian Health Service, I led the Agile transformation chapter to achieve the highest score possible. The score achieved was 9.5 over 10.
Education
Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering
University of Seville - Seville, Spain
Certifications
SAFe 4 Agilist
Scaled Agile
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)
Scrum.org
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Confluence, Azure App Service, Slack, Jira, Miro, Zoom
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Lean, DevOps, Azure DevOps, Kanban, Microservices
Other
Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Communication, Agile Coaching, Dashboards, Agile Certified Practitioner, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Surveys, Microsoft Teams, Mechanical Engineering, Kaizen, 5S, Online Payments, Agile Program Management, Artificial Intelligence (AI)
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring