KaiRise

In my role as a Partner at KaiRise, I spearheaded the development of the industry's first on-demand ICAgile accredited course, transforming the way agile training is delivered. By prioritizing flexibility and speed, I successfully increased course enrollment and client satisfaction, making agile training more accessible than ever before.

Partner

Accenture

Working across all Federal accounts and capabilities at AFS’ San Antonio location, promote awareness and adoption of Lean-Agile values, principles, processes and technical practices. Consult with clients and account teams on effective patterns for transformation and high-quality delivery. Provide thought leadership to enable accounts to grow their Lean-Agile practice. Provide sales and BD support at the account, sector and portfolio level. 

Primary focus falls into four key areas:

Delivery Support - Jumpstart new Agile projects by helping client teams understand Agile, onboard key roles, execute Sprint Zero. Work closely with project leadership to assess organizational impediments, measure flow and develop strategies for continuously improving. 

Thought Leadership - Collaborate with the AFS Agile Institute, Accenture LLP,  and the industry as a whole to promote local adoption of our corporate capabilities, and industry best practices. 

Education - Provide classroom training to project teams and clients in our ICAgile accredited courses and the Scaled Agile (SAFe) curriculum. 

Sales Enablement - Play an active role in supporting business development and proposal efforts for Agile opportunities across all accounts.

Agile Consultant

Compassion International

As a servant-leader, coach the global solutions engineering teams (currently 11 agile teams) to manage the life cycle of critical corporate-wide and customer-specific technology based products primarily using Lean and Agile SDLC practices – Scrum, KanBan, XP, ScrumBan, SAFe.  

Continuously develop a work environment promoting continual improvement and learning, free from fear of failure, while supporting mistakes that encourage continual learning.  Employ a Lean leadership style focusing on developing team members’ skills. 
Serve as an Agile Coach and transformation agent as the ministry transforms to a new way of thinking, applying Lean Agile principles to all levels of work.  Create teams that are jointly responsible for success, solving problems together in ways that develop people’s capabilities and increases their engagement and commitment, focusing on respect for people.

Develop and implement global strategy for application software design and development. Ensure staffing and development in function to provide technical and strategic expertise in the creation of global inter-related system design for existing architecture or new deployments.  Direct the development of specifications and requirements to integrate global applications.  Serve as catalyst and expert leader, driving the development and implementation of new standards in software development.

Provide strategic direction in gathering requirements and development specifications to design and integrate into applications.  Direct application software design and development services and technical leadership for existing architecture or new deployments. Create an environment that attracts and develops skilled professional staff engaged in coding, testing, implementing, and maintaining large software applications.

Sr. Director - Solutions Engineering

Direct technology delivery focused on enterprise services (Service Oriented Architecture and the Enterprise Service Bus)  enterprise information management (the Enterprise Data Warehouse) and enterprise database management (MSSQL DBMS).
Direct enterprise information management solutions, division staff and resources. 
Direct solutions delivery, process and policy assurance, budgeting and financial management, resource planning, management reporting and the attainment of cross-organizational objectives and service levels. Collaborate with IT management teams, key decision-makers and global stakeholders to identify, recommend, develop, implement and support cost-effective, strategically - aligned enterprise data management solutions for all aspects of the global organization.
As Strategic Business Partner, and Agile Coach, participate in the development and execution of strategies to drive agile adoption throughout the organization. Examples include defining an Agile maturity model, establishing best practices, teaching Agile related classes and guiding the Managing Directors, Product Managers and project leads in the establishment of Agile practices.

Director - Enterprise Technology, SBP

Douglas County

Responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Elections office in a medium-sized County, providing direct supervision, coordination, and technical guidance to staff, maintaining a high level of morale, ensuring service excellence and increasing team productivity. Supported advanced technical needs of office staff, as well as Directors and Elected Officials both inside and outside of Douglas County, including hardware/software support, project management, business analysis, and vendor relations.   Utilized sophisticated technology skills to streamline processes and reduce overhead by implementing methodologies to improve support, manage customer expectations, and build strong cross-agency relationships. Recognized leader in the State by the Colorado Department of State (CDOS) with regards to voting systems technology and statewide voter registration database management.

Senior Product Manager

Senior System Analyst

Reformed PMP turned Agile delivery expert | Helping you earn more 💵 | Agile certification pays - get yours today at your own pace. KaiRise.com

Instructor-led agile training is one of the worst ways to up-skill your workforce. There are 3 gigantic problems with old-school, instructor led training.

🚫 It pulls workers away from their daily jobs to take training
🚫 It takes forever to schedule, coordinate and run
🚫 It doesn’t scale

◾️What I do

I'm a partner at KaiRise, with three decades of experience helping enterprises implement agility. We've cracked the code on how to train your staff in a way that actually generates results.

◾️How We Help?

I’ve distilled what I’ve learned into the fastest most effective way to earn the ICAgile Certified Professional Certification. We created the world’s first on-demand ICAgile accredited course.

It’s used at enterprises around the world to transform the learning experience, while stretching budget dollars and…

👉Is Available 24/7
👉Is Trusted & Certified 
👉Has Bite-sized learning for seamless integration into daily tasks
👉Has zero death by powerpoint or forgetting everything you’ve just learned
👉Will certify your workforce in half the time of regular training

◾️Expected Results

✅ 40% reduction in training costs
✅ 30% increase in the volume of certifications issued
✅ 50% reduction in the time to complete training
✅ 72 Net Promoter Score (excellent)

◾️Don't just take my word for it

“Absolutely loved the content, format, and instruction style of this course. The self-pacing was great for my learning style. Would recommend it to practically anyone!”
Stella Griffith - Sr. Business Analyst at Fidelity Investments

“Great Course and Engaging Style. From the bite-sized learning modules to the reinforcement through quizzes and interactive activities, this course is a great intro to the world of Agile.”
Ian Santo Domingo - Principal & Managing Director at Vault Consulting

“I am a Certified ScrumMaster, but I truly believe this course has set me up for broader organizational success. I can't say enough great things about Agile Foundations!”
Lindsey Parker - Strategic Projects Coordinator at Fellowship of Christian Athletes

And many more at www.KaiRise.com

◾️My Background

With three decades of hands-on experience, completed 16 agile certifications, and having trained thousands, I've garnered over 10,000 followers and earned recognition as a top voice in the Agile Community by LinkedIn. My journey has taken me through diverse landscapes, from startups and nonprofits to global corporations and government agencies.

◾️Contact

Ready to change your enterprise training experience? Send me a LinkedIn DM and let's explore if we're a fit. 

💻www.KaiRise.com

Mike Lyons

Flutter UK & Ireland

Growing and leading a world-class Business Agility Coaching and Consulting capability - delivering targeted, measurable impact and guiding the transition to product-led operating models.

Principal Agile Coach

Created and led an internal Consultancy Model, delivering tailored consulting, coaching, mentoring, and facilitation services to tackle systemic challenges, delivering annual benefits exceeding £1m through reduced friction and increased capacity, while also establishing a clear pathway for colleagues to progress towards professional consulting roles;

Successfully launched and expanded a global Agility Community of Practice, growing to 500 colleagues, providing structured and sponsored events bringing together internal speakers and external industry expertise to encourage collaboration and alignment;

Led Leadership Teams in transitioning from project-led to product-led ways of working, evolving communication methods, metrics, organisational structures, and behaviours to optimise for increasing customer centricity, emphasising product strategy ownership from discovery to delivery;

Designed and facilitated strategic workshops across multiple tribes, guiding leadership teams to clearly define Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics (VMOST), providing actionable steps, required behaviours and capabilities, and credible execution pathways;

Led successful consulting engagements with Emerging Technology teams, establishing international distributed teams and defining effective working practices to rapidly support innovation in AI, Quantum Computing, and edge technologies;

Provided strategic advice to the Global People Leadership Team, supporting the creation of actionable pathways to convert organisational strategies into actionable plans, supported communities, working groups, clearly defined roles, and outcome-focused roadmaps;

Established and evolved inner-source platforms to accelerate organisational knowledge sharing, alignment, innovation, and discoverability, including an enterprise-wide Body of Knowledge, Team API, and Template Repository, benefiting 150+ teams.

Principal Agile Delivery Lead

Agile Yorkshire

Doing agile stuff to create, cultivate and organise a great community of collaboration, expertise and inclusivity for agile, agility and leadership professionals across Yorkshire and beyond!

Board Member

that Agile

Providing professional coaching, expert mentoring, facilitation services, and training for agile, DevOps and product teams across the FinTech, Marketing, Cryptocurrency, and public sectors;

Delivering impartial and unbiased team, organisation level, and problem specific diagnostics, providing clients with insights into the systemic roots of symptoms and their resolutions;

A trusted advisor, partnering with leaders and companies to develop more responsive delivery methods, principles and ways of working, to increase innovation, detect risks earlier, and achieve more confident forecasts.

Principal Agile and DevOps Consultant

Sky Betting & Gaming

Guided the merger of two high performing platform and reliability engineering teams, providing coaching, mentoring, facilitation, and training to seamlessly align ways of working, establish and grow a shared culture, whilst maintaining a responsive, quality service to other teams;

Provided executive coaching and mentoring to directors and VPs in agile leadership, enabling the creation of authentic, innovative cultures focused around clearly articulated OKRs, reducing time to value on multi-year programmes to weeks, whilst reinvigorating strategic initiatives;

Established a professional coaching, mentoring, and consulting service within the group, embedding coaching ethics, growing a client base, creating coaching agreements, development plans, whilst measuring and demonstrating benefits achieved at business and personal levels;

Grew a cross-company team to develop, maintain and innovate an app container deployment pipeline and toolkit using K8s, focusing on a seamless developer experience, reducing app deployment times from months to days, whilst improving platform observability and security;

Led the introduction of Complexity Theory within the Flutter Group, providing leadership, training, and mentoring in deploying Cynefin across domains and communities of practice, accelerating team learning, reducing risk, and increasing forecasting confidence;

Aligned risk communication across programme, project, and delivery teams, leading disciplines to create a ubiquitous language to communicate risk and changing conditions early and with increased clarity articulating paths to resolution and creating a ‘no-surprises’ environment;

Implemented a suite of bots, bringing the monitoring and alerting metaphor to delivery updates, enabling engineers to signal progress, warnings and key decision points, improving, transparency, expectation management, and increasing team self-management.

Senior Agile / DevOps Delivery Lead

Forecasting and Decision Making - Launched and directed a community initiative to increase the understanding of Estimates and Forecasts across teams, creating a consistent language,  establishing a regular re-forecast and communication cadence, improving delivery confidence, and increasing decision frequency and sustainable working practices. This was embedded through the improved availability of metrics and toolings, paired with a collection of new 'delivery behaviours and habits, encouraged across the delivery community and leadership team. 

Work Visibility - Developed an initiative to increase work visibility at a squad and tribe level, providing delivery practitioners and senior leaders with improved confidence and insights into the types of work moving through teams and programmes at any time. This enabled more effective planning and sustainable working practices, shifting teams and leadership decisions from reactive to proactive decision-making, reducing toil whilst increasing roadmap stability. 

Delivery Practices - Embedded a collection of Delivery Practices within the delivery community. These increased collaboration and resiliency between individual Agile Delivery Leads through a 'key products peer review' scheme, reduced barriers between teams and professions by pursuing an 'open by default' communication strategy, and guaranteed staff time for 'deep work' and continuous personal development, improving staff welfare.

Staff Development Plans - Established a Personal Development Plan for each direct report, creating an opportunity for individuals to identify, understand and communicate their strengths, preferred learning and working styles to others, improving performance and confidence. This was supported by a personalised growth plan, enabling each to set out their agile practice journey, the different agile coaching stances they wished to invest energy and grow, and how personal growth could be linked with the wider community and capability.

Agile Delivery Manager

Brought together disparate teams as part of recurring planning to increase roadmap visibility, raising the bar on accurately understanding needs, reducing dependencies and risk to deliver critical business objectives, whilst creating teams in a constant state of readiness;

Defined a range of team collaboration models, including 'pop-up squads' to optimise delivery, reduce lead time and rapidly solve complex problems, leading multiple initiatives, coordinating, removing blockages, and promoting this approach across the company; 

Developed and promoted agile team design concepts across the group and 'delivery recipes' to accelerate delivery in specific contexts and improve predictability; 

Established several cross-company agile communities of practice, enabling staff to sharpen practices, arranging visits to other companies to encourage broader awareness and innovation.

Agile / DevOps Delivery Lead

The Retro Podcast

I'm the co-founder and host of a podcast where I interview leaders and experts in the field of agile, product and coaching.

Founder and Host

South Yorkshire Police

Head of Business Intelligence, Digital Product and Application Delivery, leading a team focused on reliability engineering, analytics, user experience and innovation for Humberside and South Yorkshire Police forces.

Head of Delivery - Digital, Analytics and Apps

Led and grew a highly successful Platform team, delivering a vision of a 'data-driven, people-centred' operating model, promoting roadmap and product stability, reducing toil, and improving security and reliability through promoting a DevSecOps culture;

Delivery of a portfolio of complex initiatives, including customer-facing products, migrations, strategic platforms, and meeting compliance requirements, improving cross-team planning effectiveness through a culture of open communication and continuous alignment;

Skills: Leadership, Management, Application Support, Scaling, Reliability, Cloud, Kanban, Product Roadmaps, Coaching, eXtreme Programming, DevOps, Paired Working, Demand Management, Predictive Analysis.

DevOps Delivery Lead

Developed and led a successful group-wide agile training programme for engineers, product managers and business analysts, providing mentoring and learning packages across the group to grow the agile delivery capability.

Agile Trainer - SBG Tech Academy

Customer Account Squad Lead, providing delivery management, team coaching and structuring to support applications, products and the development of new features. Focused on growing multi-disciplined, complimentary teams (contractor and permanent staff) that are highly resilient, practicing continuous delivery. 

Established and grew a high-energy programme team (20+) to deliver a next-generation Login service to support business growth, improving customer experience and ensuring business readiness, whilst cultivating an Agile, DevOps and Product focused culture;

Tightly aligned Service, InfoSec, and Ops teams to create a delivery lifecycle accelerating product delivery in regulated markets, shifting-left on operational readiness and compliance;

Brought together multiple teams in response to the GDPR Consent need, quickly creating a high performing team with alignment across legal, marketing and CRM to successfully meet challenging compliance milestones;

Led the delivery of a company-wide programme to improve gambling self-exclusion, aligning multiple teams, whilst automating delivery metrics to gain early high delivery confidence;

Developed and led a 'War Games' initiative to stress-test new products, bringing together business functions to validate products' robustness before release, encouraging 'end-to-end' service thinking and enabling the successful launch of complex cross-organisation deliveries.

Skills: Leadership, Business Intelligence, Metrics, Impact Mapping, User Story Mapping, Team Building, Hack Days, Stakeholder Engagement, Kanban, Theory of Constraints, New Service/Product Commissioning, War Games, BDD, Product Roadmaps, Coaching, eXtreme Programming, DevOps, Paired Working, Demand, Incident and Team Performance Management, Predictive Analysis.

Agile Delivery Lead - Login, Account and Safer Gambling Squads

UK Home Office

Head of Value Stream for a service transformation programme (40+ staff), directing a combined delivery and policy redesign group, coordinating with departments across government to create a collaborative, fast-paced, focused delivery capability, and culture; 

Agile Delivery and Chapter Lead for the Home Office agile community - leading, developing and managing business analysts, programme managers, delivery managers and engineers;

Created supportive and challenging career development plans to grow professions, embedding a data-driven, people-centred continuous improvement mindset across the group;

Technology Senior Leadership team member, promoting and encouraging a culture of respect, autonomy, and accountability, working with peers across government to align roadmaps, manage dependencies and mitigate risks to increase overall effectiveness;

Established the role of ‘Policy Owner’ in strategic, User Centred Design programmes, reducing decision making time by 70%, and creating a successful operating model for future initiatives; 

Managed suppliers (T&M and outcome contracts) and Invitations to Tender, creating a collaborative partner environment, improving value for money, and increasing delivery capability;

Led the application of Validated Learning, hypothesis-driven development, Theory of Constraints and DevSecOps concepts to reduce risk, optimising product development flow within teams, allowing early product release and increased InfoSec confidence.


Skills: Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe, Agile Coaching, Lean Startup, Validated Learning, Product Management, Red Teaming, Service Strategy and Design.

Senior Delivery Manager / Agile Lead / Release Train Engineer / Value Stream Engineer

Lead for Digital and Innovation Services, responsible for public and internally facing digital product, service design and delivery, providing strategic services to accelerate the merger of two organisations and their channels;

Established, recruited, and developed product, support, and infrastructure teams to create a new, Digital Portfolio, defining governance structures to provide executive direction with autonomy, delivering market-leading digital contact and intelligence platforms;

Implemented a demand management and portfolio system across two organisations, establishing an enterprise-level Kanban system to prioritise work, improve capacity forecasting and surface dependencies, reducing work in process by 80% and shrinking delivery lead times;

Digital Transformation Programme Lead, directing the delivery of an enterprise-wide platform to enable secure access to policies and business intelligence in 'no more than two clicks';

Led the delivery of a first to market online crime tracking portal, building a team of Product Owners and engineers, whilst guiding the organisation in establishing agile delivery as a preferred product delivery approach.

Skills: Digital, Social Media, Corporate Communications, Product Management, Service Strategy and Design, Business Case Development, Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe, Coaching, Validated Learning. 

Technologies: Platform Agnostic

Digital and Innovation Services Lead

Responsible for leading and coaching a cross site team managing IT asset procurement, suppliers and service contracts.

Skills: Service Management and Recovery

Interim Commercial Services Manager

Led a technology portfolio across two businesses, creating a single highly resilient professional services group, coordinating work between counterparts, reducing dependencies, and improving forecasting confidence to realise a vision of a modern transformation team;

Led, managed, and grew a multisite team of project managers, business analysts and developers (15+), transitioning staff, projects, and programmes from traditional waterfall approaches to agile delivery principles, shrinking estimate vs actual deviation by 30%;

Directed the delivery management and business analysis of a programme to increase front line policing efficiency using mobile devices, releasing over 100k hours of underutilised capacity, and reducing investigation times;

Agile Programme Lead for an IT estate migration from Windows XP to 10, establishing roadmaps, developing multi-skilled agile delivery teams, overcoming the challenges of delivering heavy infrastructure change and gaining the benefits of an iterative, MVP focused approach.  

Skills: Digital, Social Media, Corporate Communications, Service Strategy and Design, Business Case Development, BPMN, Earned Value Analysis, Facilitation, Prince2, Scrum, Kanban, Demand, Performance Management, Coaching.

Technologies: Java, Oracle Forms, APEX, PL/SQL, Sharepoint, Drupal, Jira.

Projects and Development Team Leader

Provided Business Analysis and Project Management services for a range of strategic projects and programmes including; the delivery of national policy knowledge bases, process reengineering across high risk business units, the design and delivery of software products from internal teams and cloud providers.

Skills: Service Strategy and Design, BPR, BPMN, Business Case Development, Earned Value Analysis, Requirements Specification, UML, User Stories, Scrum, Prince2, Test Cases.

Technologies: Java, Oracle Forms, APEX, PL/SQL, Drupal

Business Analyst / Project Manager

Managed a range of software development projects to successfully deliver large scale web based applications to support; records management, complex training requirements and multi agency investigations.

Skills: BPR, BPMN, Requirements Specification, UML, Use Case Descriptions, Testing, Prince2, Earned Value Analysis, Scrum.

Technologies: Java, Oracle Forms, APEX, PL/SQL

Acting Business Analyst, specialising in business process reengineering to support a range of strategic programmes. Led the standardisation of processes across three organisations to improve quality of service and specification of requirements to support product development.

Skills: BPR, BPMN, Requirements Specification, UML

Technologies: Documentum, HTML, PL/SQL

Acting Business Analyst

Managed the design and development of a procurement system, working with stakeholders to agree just-in-time stock management and processes, preparing requirement specifications, developing software products and overseeing release and review.

Skills: BPR, Requirements Specification, UML, Test Cases. 

Technologies: PL/SQL, APEX, HTML.

Software Developer

Developed a range of software systems to support; stock control, enterprise records management and work allocation, working in software development teams of varying sizes.

Skills: Business Cases, Requirements Specification, BPMN, Storyboards, UML

Technologies: PL/SQL, HTML.

Student Analyst

An experienced Agile and Product Delivery Leader specialising in building high-performing, innovative product teams. 

An expert in Business Agility, Agile, DevOps, and product-led transformations, with a proven track record of delivering change across Fintech, Entertainment, Gaming, Crypto, and the Public Sector. 

Partners closely with senior leaders and teams, providing tailored coaching, facilitation, mentoring, and consulting, clarifying strategic goals, developing and aligning organisational capabilities, and delivering sustainable roadmaps that evolve organisations, empower and motivate teams, to reduce the lead time to impact.

taplio

The Battle

Mike Lyons

Tom Hoyland

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