Antony Pope

Experience

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  Northern Rock

  Jan 2006 - Sept 2006

  Test Analyst

  Test Analyst for Lifetime and Buy-to-Let mortgage intermediary products

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  Experian Data Quality UK

  Sept 2006 - Feb 2024

  Sole Scrum Master for an initiative to create and establish EDQ’s Matching and Linkage solutions as part of a wider Data Management strategy.• Joined a small innovation team (PO, architect and 3 developers) at proof of concept stage.• Established and evolved processes, practices and culture within the team: with a Scrum foundation. Particular attention on work management: breaking down requirements, feature and story definition and its organisation in MS-VSTS and roadmap.• Ensured clear focus on a Single Customer View proposition (Name and Address matching)• Supported the growth of the core development team up to 13 (architect, developers and testers) and splitting out into two feature teams: conceptually using the Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework.• Driver for high technical and procedural standards resulting in frequent internal and commercial releases reducing the cycle time of incremental improvements.• Frequent delivery of quality, working software aided excellent, timely collaboration with internal stakeholders generating feedback and enabling relevant prioritisation.• Currently leading the integration of the Matching capability into EDQ’s future Data Management platform, expected to bring to life the Match standalone API and accelerate growth. Show less Lead Scrum Master across Address Data Quality product portfolio and Scrum Master for spin-off start-up team to explore an innovative, new tech, opportunity.• Efficiency gains presented an opportunity to combine existing product teams and spin off a small start-up team.• Expanded cross-functional Kanban team with 9 full-time members (developers, test, deployment, product owner and scrum master) and a wider virtual product team (including product marketing, infrastructure operations, web developer, professional services and support).• Clear focus on the value proposition, the market problem and producing regular demonstrable software for feedback to prove or disprove any hypotheses.• Restful API with a hosted stack utilising technologies such Elastic Search (ELK) to enable real-time (responses under 100ms) predictive auto-completion of address entry.• Launched in UK, APAC and NA. New logos and customer migrations accelerating. Revenue hit $1m mark within 12 months of UK launch.• Product continually evolving with frequent releases: leading to organisation-wide Continuous Delivery initiative. Show less Formed new team (4 developers, 2 testers and a product owner) as part of the newly adopted stable, delivery team-based development organisation.• Team responsible for £65m annual revenue of Address Capture set of products with a focus on product sustainability and revenue protection.• C/C++ codebase evolved over 20 years.• Major achievements included successful balancing of multi-regional customer maintenance requirements whilst reducing number of active product versions from 18 to 2 resulting in a huge efficiency gain.Continuation of Agile transformation• On boarding of MS-TFS as ALM tool• Working with the other scrum masters, product management and development management (cross-site) to ensure the successful running and evolution of the organisation.• Set up and running of Scrum Master community.• Evolution of PMO: Definition of product (rather than project) oriented SDLC, roadmap approach, metric reporting and leading Experian’s process audit of EDQ (achieving top effectiveness rating whilst educating the auditors on agile practices). Show less Project Manager transitioned into Scrum Master for a large project to replicate our existing on premise address capture solution with a client-side application and hosted, SaaS, server.• Having turned around the fortunes of a troubled project to deliver a first commercial release (tactically introducing Agile techniques) I gained senior management approval to adopt Scrum on the project and lead its transition• As a team, we successfully delivered a further five incremental releases over 13 months across four regions (APAC, EMEA, UK&I and NA); all with competing priorities.• The team’s successes and achievements were key to gaining the green light for a wider Agile transformation.Set up and chaired an Agile Transformation Community (ATC) to support the wider Agile adoption; with a focus on Scrum. Achievements included:• Proposed the approach to technical directors and gained approval to set up the community consisting of departmental heads as thought leaders and change agents.• Supported definition of transformational drivers.• Supported the gaining of buy-in from both the technical and the business aspects of EDQ.• Supported the rollout of Scrum projects across our regional and global programmes.• Set up a partnership with an external Agile consultancy to roll out training and team coaching.• Initiated and led a Scrum Master surgery for our Scrum Master community and provided coaching for active Scrum Masters, Product Owners and team members• Proposed and supported an organisational restructure around portfolio management and stable, dedicated and long-life Scrum teams for Financial Year 2014.Continuation of Programme Management and Team Management responsibilities from previous role.• Regional programme management for EMEA and North America until end of FY13 when programme structure was replaced by delivery stream organisation.• Managed a team of two Project Managers and jointly supported the PMO function: governance, people and strategic changes. Show less This post involved acting in multiple, simultaneous roles. My responsibilities grew to complement successful experience:• As a Project Manager I would run between four and six concurrent projects. Projects would range from two to six months, team sizes of three to five (consisting of Developers, Testers, Technical Authors, Business Analysts and Product Managers) and a budget of £35k to £250k.• As a Programme Manager I managed three programmes (regional portfolio of projects) with a combined annual budget (staff cost) of around £1m. This included developing the programme roadmap in accordance with the programme mandate, resource/budget control, actively managing risks, resolving issues and change requests. Show less

  • Agile Delivery Manager for Aperture Data Studio

    Aug 2018 - Feb 2024

  • Senior Scrum Master for Matching & Linkage

    Jan 2017 - Aug 2018

  • Senior Scrum Master for Address Data Quality portfolio

    May 2015 - May 2017

  • Senior Scrum Master for On Premise Address Validation

    Apr 2013 - May 2015

  • Senior Project Manager / Scrum Master for Hosted Address Validation

    Feb 2012 - Apr 2013

  • Senior Project Manager

    Oct 2010 - Feb 2012

  • Project Manager

    Apr 2008 - Oct 2010

  • Test Analyst

    Sept 2006 - Apr 2008
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  Experian Data Quality

  Dec 2023 - now

  Senior Program Manager