Liam Wickham

My job was to handle the development teams, deployments, and tech roadmap, ensure that we were part of an Agile transformation, and retrain people who had never heard of it. I was also considered a champion of Scaled Agile, as I was one of the few external program managers to have used it.

This was a highly complex program of work that was part of a digital transformation program, and we needed to work closely with dozens of data privacy, quality assurance, TMOs, PMOs, deployment steering groups, IT departments, BAs, and countless others. This meant needing to track dependencies and risks across a half dozen streams of work while corralling subject matter experts who were keener to talk all day about fascinating subjects than come to any conclusions. 

I led workshops with people who had worked at NASA, trained product managers who happened to be non-Agile Directors with 30 years of study design experience, and was part of the leadership team negotiating budgets. I won a tripling of the development team size and put in place all the operational processes of the leadership team (including Portfolio Kanban).

I was the key influencer in creating a product management guild that was widely praised from the CEO level downwards.

On behalf of the Wargaming leadership team, within the Enterprise PMO, Liam led a high-profile project to recommend, evaluate and implement a PPM / EPPM system across the organization.

This role included: stakeholder management ranging from Cxx to individual project managers; effective communications; vendor relationships; procurement; IT security and integration; Kanban project management; portfolio prioritization; requirements gathering; scope management; whatever else needed doing.

Shortlisted vendors included Agile solutions, with workshops being conducted to put the vendors through their paces and ensure our own preparation was thoroughly assessed.

Took on complete project management and implementation of crowdsourcing solution (Crowdicity) for Local Education Authority. Delivered training to all members of staff. Moderated the platform, handled technical support, motivated and drove the discussions where necessary, held regular evaluation presentations and assisted with motivating stakeholders.

As part of a supported transformation into a fully Agile development team, led the analysis and critique of a stage-gated pipeline for developing game content and transformed this into rapid prototyping, including integrating QA, engineering support and reducing waste.

This was a highly complex and demanding project, involving dozens of teams and scores of stakeholders, but reduced lead time by 50%. Transformation is never easy, but by ensuring that the junior project managers and producers were trained in Lean philosophy and kanban, we were able to stick to the plan and lend support where it was needed.

The end result was collaboration where before there was communication breakdown, reduction of waste, support for Agile methods that led to a championing of Lean Agile.