Delivery & Governance

Agile ceremonies without genuine sprint discipline are just meetings with better branding.

I’ve run Agile and Scrum delivery across banking and insurance technology programmes, and the thing that separates a delivery that actually ships from one that slips quarter after quarter is rarely the methodology. It’s whether someone is actually holding the team — including the business stakeholders — accountable to the plan.

UAT planning is where I've seen the most value get lost or won. A UAT cycle that's treated as a formality before go-live is how 40+ critical defects end up discovered by customers instead of testers. I govern UAT as a genuine quality gate: structured test scenarios, clear defect triage, and acceptance criteria that were agreed before development even started, not negotiated after the fact when timelines are already under pressure.

What this looks like day to day:

  • Process reengineering grounded in actual root cause analysis (RCA) — not assumptions about what’s broken
  • SOP design that frontline teams will genuinely follow, because it reflects how the work actually happens, not how it’s supposed to happen in theory
  • JIRA-based sprint governance that keeps development, QA, and business stakeholders looking at the same picture of progress
  • Continuous improvement built into the delivery cadence itself, not treated as a separate initiative that gets deprioritised the moment things get busy

Improving First Call Resolution by 20% at eClerx didn't come from a single big initiative. It came from disciplined, unglamorous RCA work, sprint after sprint, on the specific issue categories that were actually driving repeat contacts.

Agile / Scrum

UAT Planning

JIRA

Process Reengineering

RCA

SOP Design

Workflow Automation

Continuous Improvement