Barry Pickering

Experience

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  City Link

  Apr 1999 - Jul 2001

  Technical Sales Consultant

  Worked with the Sales team to help deliver product demonstrations.

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  ION

  Aug 2001 - May 2005

  QC Engineer
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  Wolters Kluwer UK

  May 2005 - Apr 2014

  Scrum Master for the following applications:CCH Personal Tax, EY HC, CCH Portal, Web Installer, & Irish tax releases. Setup and managed the automation effort for CCH Personal Tax using Rational Functional Tester. Manual tester responsible for Personal and Corporate tax applications.

  • Scrum Master

    Jul 2011 - Apr 2014

  • QA Team Leader

    Apr 2007 - Jul 2011

  • QA Analyst

    May 2005 - Apr 2007
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  Glow Digital Media

  Apr 2014 - Dec 2015

  Helping the development team produce excellent market leading software through the adoption of good agile and testing practices.Built up a team of 8 testers covering manual and selenium testing. Defining entry & exit criteria for the test team to follow, and ensure that we follow good practice in our testing. Implement Scrum and all its cool processes and practices.

  • Scrum Master & Head of QA

    Jan 2015 - Dec 2015

  • Scrum Master and Interim Head of QA

    Nov 2014 - Jan 2015

  • Scrum Master

    Apr 2014 - Nov 2014
• 

  Marks and Spencer

  Jan 2016 - Jun 2017

  Senior Scrum Master

  Working within M&S.com, I joined the existing agile team to assist with the transformation and rollout of agile practices within Customer Promise. Acting as scrum master for 3 onshore teams, I was responsible for the overall delivery of 6 offshore scrum teams based in Chennai.I subsequently undertook an additional role to help provide real time progress of projects at portfolio level.

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  Whitbread

  Jul 2017 - Aug 2019

  Delivery Team Manager

  Responsible for the delivery of Booking Flow functionality for our Leisure guests on PremierInn.com, my role includes acting as Scrum Master and Line Manager for a cross functional team within our Holborn office. Leading, coaching and mentoring professionals comprising QAs, Developers and Business Analysts in applying best practice and with a view towards their career development. Shared 24/7 On-Call responsibility for the entire Whitbread Digital estate.Since successfully gaining JIRA Certification in April 2019, I've acted as the lead JIRA Administrator across the Whitbread estate with over 500 users.This has involved designing and running JIRA training courses for over 100 colleagues in Head Office, following up the training with coaching on how best to apply the tool to reflect ways of working, and then creating specific workflows and dashboards to support these behaviours in program delivery. Show less

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  Lawson Wilson Consulting LTD

  Sept 2019 - Jan 2021

  Director
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  Vodafone

  Oct 2019 - now

  I accepted a full time position with Vodafone and was promoted to Chapter Lead for the Digital Engineering department. Vodafone are transitioning from a telco towards becoming a global tech company and Digital Engineering are at the forefront of this transformational change.As Scrum Master Manager, I support and lead a team of 9 high performing Scrum Masters as they create cross functional Agile Development teams. Together we have worked hard to create a positive culture where failure is celebrated, change through continuous improvement is normal and waste tracked and called out.Working alongside the Agile Lead, my responsibilities include hiring and maintaining a talented squad of Scrum Masters, mentoring and coaching Scrum Masters and other senior leaders to question why we work the way we do, and to continually seek to break work down and deliver customer value quickly.Together we are embedding operating models that value ownership, responsiveness, predictability and transparency. We are mature users of Azure Dev Ops and use the tool as our single point of truth across 50+ engineering teams, employing a data-first approach using the insights gained to continually strive to improve.The role also involves organising and facilitating our quarterly Product Increments (PI) ranging from PI Kick Off, through to team planning, e2e cross team sessions and stakeholder reviews. All the while using Azure Dev Ops as our foundation.We’ve also started utilising Lean techniques around identifying and limiting Work In Progress (WIP) and trying to influence incoming demand through limiting batch sizes. Show less

  • Scrum Master Manager

    Dec 2020 - now

  • Senior Scrum Master

    Oct 2019 - Dec 2020