Craig Cockburn

Red Team Thinking helps leaders make better decisions faster in today’s complex world. It does this by arming decision makers with an array of simple-to-use, yet incredibly powerful, applied critical thinking tools and groupthink mitigation techniques developed by the military and intelligence agencies. By applying these methods, businesses and other organizations can respond more quickly and effectively to new threats and opportunities, allowing them to become one of the disruptors, rather than one of the disrupted. For more info - see https://www.redteamthinking.com/

Delivering greater collaboration and more effective ways of working in a car factory Plus talks on critical thinking, neurodiversity and advanced training Customer feedback: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/engr-ahsan-raza_scrummaster-agile-professionaldevelopment-activity-7351607359594512384-yGmb

Agility lead introducing and embedding the effective use of agile in multiple scrum teams and across the organisation to support better longer term planning through metrics and continuous improvement. Extensive use of Microsoft Azure Devops for Kanban/Scrum boards. Built and deployed various dashboards in Microsoft ADO and PowerBI to make key business metrics visible and to see change over sprints and over quarters. Extensive use of ChatGPT to assist with PowerBI coding. Worked closely with the CTO, CPO and COO to improve delivery

Expert Practitioner with the HiveMind network https://thehive.hivemindnetwork.com/members/craig_cockburn/

The Scottish Government backed not-for-profit company that runs the registry for the cultural and linguistic top level internet domain for Scotland (launched 2014). Our website is at https://dot.scot/ News coverage: http://news.stv.tv/scotland/293230-thousands-of-dot-scot-domain-names-registered-in-first-hour/ Key users include www.gov.scot (The Scottish Government) firstminister.gov.scot/ (The First Minister of Scotland) alexsalmond.scot (Former First Minister of Scotland) welcome.scot (The official gateway to Scotland) parliament.scot (The Scottish Parliament) Award nominations: Scottish Digital Tech Awards 2017 The Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards 2017

Short training engagement using my SPC6 enablements to deliver multiple training courses in Scaled Agile to well over 100 leaders in a financial services end client (Leading SAFe, SAFe PO/PM, SAFe Scrum Master). Feedback excerpt attached. High pass rates.

Agile Coach for AIB Dublin. Working as part of a CoE and helping a number of teams to get established in agile ways of working and migration onto the Agile Ways of Working programme and standardised quarterly planning and reporting. Many team members were new to agile and needed 1-1 coaching in tooling and getting started with Jira and Scrum. Delivered course on Kanban to the organisation.

Engagement of almost 2 years. 100% Remote. Coached teams, created multiple training courses and delivered to several hundred colleagues. Helped to set up Agile Centre of Excellence, define and roll out new organisational processes and coach teams.

See https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/trainer-list/trainer-profile/?id=4468&full_name=Craig%20Cockburn

Advisor, Red Team Thinker and Country Ambassador for the Agile20Reflect festival. From a small idea in July 2020 in the middle of lockdown, the festival has pivoted, grown and gone global as a month long global series of events to mark 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was signed in Snowbird. Looking on agile, past, present and future. Embracing diversity, multiple languages and talks around the world and in conjunction with the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, Project Management Institute, Business Agility institute and including events from the Agile Business Consortium, Scaled Agile and self hosted events big and small to reflect the diversity that is agile in 2021. See https://agile20reflect.org/ for more info and details of how to contribute or get involved. Over 800 events! Following the festival, agile20reflect has now set up Access Agile https://access-agile.org/

Onboarded during Covid19 fully remote work from home to support 10 teams, leadership and the wider agile programme as part of a large agile transformation. Tooling using Mural, Jira, Confluence, Jira Align. Methods mostly Spotify, SAFe. Gave internal talks to the wider programme on neurodiversity and on strategy. There is an endorsement from one of my colleagues Phyroze Mohamed for the work I did at BT in the endorsements section of my LinkedIn profile

Assignment for Morgan Stanley (Enterprise Agile Coach, Agile Transformation). Based in London Docklands

Enterprise Agile Coach based in London supporting distributed teams across three continents on their agile journey (via UST Global)

Enterprise Agile Coach working in Regulatory reporting helping a number of distributed agile teams in agile practices. Received advanced training in Leankit, set up boards for teams and supported teams in use of the tool. Ran a number of webinars and wrote articles on agile practices (OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, Team Canvas, Feature Teams). Collaborated with the wider agile community on systemic improvements. Helped set up cool wall which resulted in senior leadership involvement in cross domain improvements.

Enterprise agile coach working as part of a coaching team to support a large portfolio of work involving cloud adoption and distributed teams. Helped 4 teams in my area to adopt agile practices and tooling. Supported PI planning event for the wider programme. Collaborated with 3 other agile coaches in the wider programme to introduce agile practices and culture to leaders, team members and apprentices who were new to agile. Participated in lean coffee sessions. Participated in online agile forums at the bank to share knowledge outside my immediate area. In my spare time organised events for Scaled Agile Scotland, attended Lean Agile Scotland and became a Certified Enterprise Agile Coach.

Lean Agile Coach scaling agile in a banking transformation programme Involved with hackathons; scrum; kanban; lean; OKRs; systems thinking; digital transformation, value streams and rolling out agile at scale across a large bank.

Agile leadership contract work (scrum master, development manager) based in Forres, Moray, Scotland supporting a distributed programme of development for HMRC on a banking platform. Also set up Jira/Confluence to support Kanban / Scrum (Scrumban) Qualified as SAFe SPC4.

Digital Director, the Epsilon Project. See http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Epsilon-Project-4951698

Social marketing for jobseekers. Back in 1989 I got in the paper for an online job matching service. Now it's time to do something useful to shake up recruitment a bit, 22 years later. I also own movehouses.com

Agile consultant helping the end client, The Charities Commission for England and Wales, with Digital Transformation and online services. Use of Jira and Confluence. Introduced the use of Slack for distributed team communication.

Technical Programme Manager working via Endava on an Agile Digital Transformational programme comprising multiple projects for a financial client in Edinburgh.

Scrum Master at Sky, Livingston delivering improvements to Agile processes and supporting the delivery and maintenance of CRM solutions for Sky's contact centre and customers. Extensive use of Jira / Confluence to organise product backlog, sprints, team knowledge, reports, dependencies, coordination and visibility of work in progress and forthcoming work.

Short contract as Agile Product Manager for HMRC within the Newcastle (Longbenton) Digital Delivery centre. 20 agile teams work here delivering the UK Government's biggest transformation programme, see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-tax-digital We work closely with GDS in order that new services can be approved for launch in line with the GDS Service Standard https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

Agile Programme Assurance consultant assessing a programme of work across 4 scrum teams for a large public sector client. Evaluated agile capability, wrote report and made recommendations for programme delivery improvements to enable to client to replan the project based on agile velocity, customer requirements, team capabilities and delivery processes.

Transformation Change Manager working on a mandatory banking regulation project for the European Deposit Guarantee Scheme (formerly the Financial Services Compensation Scheme) with the Personal and Business Banking Division of RBS. Responsible for working with the business teams to manage work in progress, report risks and issues, track deliverables and inform key users of progress.

See http://www.gmnhome.com/global-marketing-network-appoints-technology-czar.html for news release and details.

Supported teams in Perth as part of the Guidewire Agile programme including attending and giving feedback as part of scrum ceremonies, working closely with various teams (both on site and offshore). Updated and successfully delivered a training course on scrum.

Senior Project Manager / Scrum Master on a major digital project for the Scottish Public Sector. www.mygov.scot is is the place for people in Scotland to access public services that are easy to find and simple to use. Tools used included Jira Agile, Confluence, SonarQube (Code Quality), Apache Solr (Search), Github, Puppet

Picked up two projects that were just starting and took them through the initiation phase to feasibility and £2.5m sign off. Ran competitive procurement workshops with BT/ Standard Life to select preferred vendor Carried out all project meetings, status updates, reporting and management required on 2 challenging projects – one to upgrade the F5 BigIP infrastructure and the other to replace the corporate Call Recording Solution. Approval raised at Director level due to the budget size. Wrote Feasibility Statement of Works for both projects which resulted in the projects being approved to progress.

Project Manager, Tesco Marketing IT. Project manager on the rollout of features and functionality and support for My Clubcard Account Ireland involving distributed team across in Ireland, UK and India. Successfully picked up a project and turned it around for a successful launch and handover to support. Following this project I had to relocate to Scotland for family reasons and subsequently spent a year as a single father.

Consultant delivering on a portfolio of large infrastructure projects for global EMC customers including disk remediation, infrastructure replacements and upgrades across the UK and US. This was a permanent role, however there was insufficient work and as a result I received a redundancy settlement on leaving the company.

Worked on an Intranet replacement project in CQ5.5 (Adobe/Day) for the The John Lewis Partnership (Waitrose, John Lewis) including all current and retired partners in the John Lewis Partnership. Responsible for infrastructure elements including external access, User Acceptance Testing and dependencies with other projects in the partnership including Active Directory and IE6 removal. Contract extended twice. Case Study: http://www.cognifide.com/our-work/john-lewis/

Working as a Principal Agile consultant on the DWP Universal Credit Programme. This programme won "best use of agile in the public sector" at the Agile 2011 awards. I worked on both documenting and improving the bespoke Agile implementation for DWP. Agile Facilitator for telephony team, including BT, covering the contact centre infrastructure, IVR, Telephony business processes and updates into the IBM Rational suite (Rational Requirements Composer, Team Concert and Quality Manager).

Set up project using Agile DSDM to rollout DSDM, Team Foundation Server 2010 and business change within AXA Wealth using the AXA Wealth Website integration project as a pilot. An important part of this roll was coaching the team, and AXA Wealth in general, in DSDM to incorporate better Agile practices. Project manager responsible for managing the integration and rebranding of AXA Wealth websites following the transfer of business to Resolution / Friends Provident under Part VII of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Managed delivery team of 9 across business, development and test functions

Delivery manager for e-commerce related risk and regulation projects at Aviva, Norwich. Planned and coordinated deliverables amongst several IT project managers across the relevant Aviva portals for the general public, financial advisors, contact centre, and back end systems. Ensured that supply and demand for project teams aligned with project plans and delivery dates to meet compliance deadlines for the FSA. Liaised with project manager, IT manager and testing teams to compile plans, manage risks, issues, constraints, actions and dependencies.

Project manager managing multiple agile workstreams using scrum, sprints, Jira Greenhopper to develop a multi-platform e-commerce platform for iPad, iPhone, desktop and browsers. Platform distributed content from multiple news publishers, magazine and video sources in the US and UK. Project ended and over 100 people laid off due to a change in board level priorities. Managed on and off-shore streams: Day CMS and US based Kyte video and Dow Jones (Factiva)

Managing significant web projects at Directgov - the official UK government website for citizens. Work included the Spending Challenge website for the office of No10 Downing Street - peak traffic approx 400,000 page views an hour Please see the "publications" section for further details on this project. Saved the UK government over £500m Also project managed the delivery of an accessible video player

Managed the web element of 3 projects in the financial services sector (insurance) as part of the RBS separation programme.

Web Programme Manager running 10 projects (inc two project managers) to bring radical improvement and transformation change to a public sector website and associated services (parking portal, revenue and benefits, online services, improved usability, design refresh, replacement CMS). Programme ended at a fixed date due to the 2010 local govenment elections in London. This programme between Vangent and Southwark Council subsequently won the "IT Project Team of the Year" award 2010 from the BCS and Computing in the "Project Excellence" category.

Recruited to lead the rollout of SharePoint 2007 across the PCT to 4000 users and to investigate future opportunities with SharePoint 2010. Initiated programme to achieve this, wrote project plans and PID, engaged with customers and external vendors and had a significant amount of hands-on experience with Sharepoint 2007. Unfortunately this assignment was ended due to a restructuring and a change in the nature of the work. Positive references available.

Contract Project Manager working for the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishing house managing software releases to the American K-6 educational market. These products help children with their reading in English and Spanish.

Project managing the redesign of major poker website (fulltiltpoker.com). This was the stickiest website in the world at the time according to Nielsen online. Assignment ended following successful completion of work.

Web Project manager based at Department for Business, Westminster, London managed a project for a major UK government web portal and infrastructure selection and migration, using PRINCE2 and OGC standards. Assignment ended due to backfilling by permanent staff.

Project Manager, based in Whitehall. Successfully managed and implemented a Web 2.0 portal for the CIO council (Cabinet Office) on the Transformational Government programme. This was a secure portal for use by CTO/CIOs within the civil service as well as leading representatives from industry bodies (e.g. IAP, Intellect). My project sponsor was Martin Bellamy, CIO of the Pension Service

Project Manager at Elite Training on multiple projects delivering software solutions to the criminal justice and wider public sector in Northern Ireland. Security cleared to CTC level

Crowdspirit aimed to revolutionise the supply chain by crowdsourcing manufacturing and making it easier for customers to get the products they want to market faster. Listed in the Techcrunch40. CEO wanted the team based in France so we parted company in 2007. Crowdspirit deadpooled in April 2011

Roles I have had include: E-commerce technical lead. Promoted to development manager. Led the team to deliver e-commerce for the Scottish Tourist Board. Chief technical contact for due diligence during transfer to the private sector. Joint development lead for team of 12 across many major high profile deployments. Managed recruitment, hiring and dismissing employees, clarification and estimates for internal and 3rd party work. Support Team lead. In charge of technical testing, setup and configuration of development and test environments and change control. Promoted to test manager. Led the company's UAT and technical testing activities for 5 years across many small and major releases. Received thanks from the CEO for the deployment of the company's biggest functional upgrade. From 2002-2006 this project was a joint venture PPP with ATOS Origin,

This organisation specialised in consultancy and training for Object Technology. To support this they developed a product for more accurately estimating the time, effort, resources and development schedule for Object Oriented software projects. I was the chief user interface designer on this project and also developed the interfaces to third party products. We were a Rational partner and I worked closely with Rational in developing an interface to their modelling tool. I saw this product through many releases and developments. Although a highly innovative product and extremely useful, the company was forced into liquidation by the investors approximately 18 months after I had left for career reasons.

Relaunched the Edinburgh Mod in 1997, the main competition for the promotion of Gaelic language, culture, literature and music for adults and children. In rewriting the 100 year old rule book on how Mods were run, we gave the Edinburgh Mod a much greater emphasis on performing in the traditional Gaelic style. Organised fundraising events including hiring artists, press releases, TV publicity.

Director of the Gaelic learners association, the main charity for the promotion and support of Scottish Gaelic adult learners around the world.

This small company was based within NatWest Markets in Edinburgh, the investment banking arm of one of Britain's largest banks. We provided inhouse development and support to Natwest markets for Oracle applications running on Solaris. Separately we developed applications for other financial houses such as the Association of Investment Trust Companies including a database to manage their IFA contacts. (this company is nothing to do with the company called delphi.com)

Mature student studying for Masters degree. As part of this degree I undertook research work at the University of Washington, Seattle. As part of my thesis, I implemented a platform independent front end to a multimedia e-mail client. This introduced MIME e-mail to the University. The thesis also specialised in the enhancement of Object Oriented methods and software usability and won me the class medal. Following the M.Sc. the University hired me on a temporary basis to teach other M.Sc. students. My thesis was subsequently published in the US by the SIGS group and 10 years later was still being asked for and used as a reference work by other students. For the University's 50th anniversary in 2014, I was chosen as one of the 50 students in a commemorative publication to celebrate their 50 years.

Founded newsletter for Scots in London. Set up distribution, publication and sponsorship. Received support from some of the biggest bands in Scotland and from the Scottish media. Promoted events, societies, news, clubs, campaigns, etc. Handed over coordination end Dec 92 upon my return to Scotland where I was involved with a similar publication in the Edinburgh area.

Managed the technical certification of Digital's biggest customers worldwide and the approval for Digital to support their X.25 networks. Mostly major banks, country networks, large telecoms companies etc. Wrote part of the DECnet software - the backbone for the world's largest networking company. Migrated from there to EDI - Electronic Data Interchange, forerunner of E-commerce. Received personal recognition awards for innovation from the company's billionaire founder Ken Olsen.