Geekery as a Service

Helping people overwhelmed by data and tasks achieve more income/productivity by turning their processes and ideas into software solutions.

Chief Geek of Software Solutions in WordPress, Laravel and PHP

InnovaTech Media Ltd

The growing success of our operations at BetterWebSpace led us to incorporate the business as a part of InnovaTech Media Ltd in December 2009. 

BetterWebSpace continues to operate high quality hosting services at honest prices.

Having watched our automation work grow over 2009 we now spend much of our time working on PHP API integrations and backend development alongside our traditional hosting work.

Managing Director

BetterWebSpace

Having grown BetterWebSpace from it's early days of being a sole-trader with one or two customers (mostly friends!) where I knew everyone on a first name basis I now run BetterWebSpace as part of InnovaTech Media Ltd.

BetterWebSpace was setup in 2002 when I had already been a customer of a variety of web hosting companies over the years and found them to offer little in the way of support or value for money.

In recent years we have found ourselves spending more time working more closely with our customers to produce highly customised automation solutions in PHP as well as providing them with great support for their websites.

BetterWebSpace specialises in honest hosting at an honest price!

Sales, Support and Development

GRUBBY BUGGY LIMITED

Director

Motorola

Software Engineer in a CMM level 5 / TL900 organisation maintaining a large embedded system (GSM Base Station Network). In particular time spent working on developing and maintaining the Terrestrial Resource Management and backhaul areas for GSM networks.

Software Engineer in the Sys Admin development team development and maintenance of a wide range of scripts for Motorola's OSS products on Sun equipment.

Software Engineer

Are you a business owner tired of software working against you? 

Could having your own software provide you with time/money saving efficiencies or even that mythical unicorn of recurring income? 🦄

Do you feel like you are asking your clients or employees to do the same thing time and time again and the errors creep in, often between the chair and the keyboard? 🤬

Would you like someone to take that painful system make it more efficient and put it on autopilot? Allowing YOU to spend more time with your family and doing the things you love?

Would you like to turn that little idea you have in your field of expertise into a system you could earn a recurring income from?

If so, I can help make that happen!

I have been a geek from an early age, quickly becoming bored of games I began learning BASIC on my ZX Spectrum with my first “Hello World” and the noisy tape deck. It was magic to see something you created appear on the screen - that buzz never left me and the wow moment with a client is still what drives me to this day.

I have a background in Engineering, both at University and then spending 9 years at Motorola, during which time I set up BetterWebSpace allowing me to show that the hosting industry can be honest and fair. BetterWebSpace still serves its clients, but I spend more of my time doing Geekery as a Service - helping people turn their ideas into reality.

A cancer diagnosis in 2005 taught me a lot about life and productivity, why waste your time fighting with data and processes when much of it can be automated? 

Why sit on that idea that could mean you get more time with your family? Life is often too short, I'm fortunate enough to be a long way clear now (and fitter and healthier than I was back then) and I certainly don't want to waste my time - why would you?

More time, more sales, less stress, recurring income, a better balance…. 

Sounds perfect? DM me today!

Keiron Skillett

Nimbility

Founder and client change maker. My clients like that I can empathise with their challenges, having been a practitioner who overcame similar situations. A typical customer will have 150-2000 staff working on product delivery, usually with an element of that being software development. However, my demonstrated approach works just as well outside of IT. 

During my time at Motorola, I experienced and saw the power of transformational change with lean and agile. So when Motorola sold the business unit I was in, and the new owner asked most of us to exit stage left, I knew what I wanted to do.

I started small, earning my stripes by aligning people and processes at the team level. Then, having developed my skills and utilising the broader organisational experience from my past, I started doing the same thing at the programme. That ultimately extended to the entire enterprise, helping the traditional product development roles and everyone work together to achieve Business Agility. 

Coming from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs, it's at the higher levels where the intersection of product and commercial come together that genuinely excites me. Acting as a catalyst for change and seeing the spark in people's eyes as they enable a revolution in their business gets me up in the morning.

Radtac

I started my relationship with Radtac, which became cprime after the buy-out, running the public Leading SAFe schedule. I took over from their Director of Consulting, appreciating his trust to be the face of their growing SAFe business.

As diaries permitted, I started consulting for them and continue this relationship today. I am pleased to report that every client I have worked with them has extended their initial contract, demonstrating that their clients value my contribution.

On the Travelport account, as a consulting team, we launched 17 SAFe Agile Release Trains (ART), including the transformation ART. As a result, this rewarded Travelport with a 90% predictability in delivery and a 88% reduction in feature lead time.

This range of figures is familiar results for my customers. If you want to know more about client success, I will share other stories when we speak.

I have grown considerably through my time working with the Scaled Agile Framework. I was rewarded for my perseverance and client success when Scaled Agile issued my SPCT certification in 2021, the 115th globally to have achieved this high bar.

SAFe Business Agility Consultant and Trainer SPCT, SPC, RTE (Associate)

Emergn Limited

My introduction to Emergn started with their Value Flow Quality (VFQ) education. Two creators took an invite-only group of industry experts through the learning material. Never one to turn down broadening my skills, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

It was through building relationships in that cohort that my engagement with Emergn started. I had four fun-filled years providing consultancy and training services on behalf of Emergn to their clients. I learnt a lot from their experienced team while I supported many organisations, single-handedly or as part of a consulting team.

Some of my favourite war stories come from this time. Like the one where we demonstrated that you could apply the underlying agile principles and substantially improve flow even on a traditional waterfall project. Or the time when the client achieved a state of business agility through having a structured way of identifying and delivering improvements and implementing a solution management approach to run the service operation.

The books that influenced me the most during this time were Don Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow, and Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal.

Principal Consultant (Associate)

Agilify Ltd

Working with end clients, aiding them on their Agile adoption. From running workshops to coaching, both at the team and organisation level.

Agile Coach (Associate)

Unboxed Consulting

Unboxed was looking for a freelance Scrum Master and Coach to support them in working with their clients. I went first to work on a project with a University where we were creating a CMS that would be surfaced through their website, exposing many other systems data.

The Unboxed and university staff bonded quickly and became a high-performing team. I spent my time supporting the team function, working around the organisation, removing impediments, and doing ad-hoc coaching to spread the word about agility.

Highlights for me included seeing a fantastic designer and UX expert work through the process of evolving backlog items and have them produced and validated by users. I also worked with some content producers to apply Kanban. As a result, I optimised their working methods, reducing the lead time by 66%.

In addition to this engagement, I lead a kick-off and project delivery for a regional business development agency. A mismatch of expectations between the customer and the agency challenged this project. However, we overcame these issues, giving me insights into client management.

Finally, my last engagement was the kick-off and being the Scrum Master on the delivery team of a ticketing solution for an internationally well-known technology and media enterprise. We delivered this project on time, and it worked very well, gaining high praise from the customer.

Scrum Master and Coach (Associate)

RippleRock

I was a freelance coach for Ripple Rock, supporting their client engagements. 

The client I was most proud of was in a sticky situation when we arrived. Having tried but gotten behind in delivering a customer project, with our guidance and the team's perseverance, we turned it around. 

In the early days, their customer would visit with someone from the customer's procurement team in tow. After rebooting the project by providing Scrum training, exposing their backlog, splitting it into multiple prioritised releases, and focusing their actions on delivering working software, the customer left their procurement person behind and started bringing users along to see the demos.

This client experience was a fabulous example of how trust and relationships can improve through the iterative 'we said, we did' cycle.

Alcatel-Lucent

Having been asked, along with most of my Motorola colleagues, to exit stage left, this was my first foray into applying agility in other organisations. 

Alcatel Lucent were interested in my telecoms background and having used Scrum in Motorola. However, I have since learned that while industry knowledge can be helpful, it is not necessary for client success. 

Here I was a Scrum Master, helping to develop the agility capability of both my team and all the other teams by guiding the other new Scrum Masters. I enjoy the process of developing people. They gain new skills, and lean and agile practices typically lead to increased job satisfaction.

The combined hard work created a level of transparency on the progress and state of the programme. However, this transparency generated another insight for me that still comes up today - leaders do not always like the answers they get! Especially when the answer is that the programme is working slower than they had hoped.

I consumed as much agile knowledge as possible and put myself through an NLP Practitioner coaching course. Over ten weekends over 12 months, this helped hone many tools in my toolbox to support people wanting to make change happen.

When I chose to move on to apply these skills again in another situation, I felt like I had earned my stripes.

Scrum Master and Coach (Contract)

Originally brought in to work on overhauling the project governance for traditional waterfall projects and trialling Agile software development using Scrum on a couple of trial projects, the role evolved to be working full time on introducing Agile Software Development across the entire Horizon GSM organisation.

While running the transformation project I set up a Steering Committee made up of the Senior Leadership Team and some of their reports. This helped give organisational direction and awareness of the project. In only a few months, we managed to roll out Agile across the projects that were on-going. I arranged for training both provided externally by a consultant and by myself.

During this process we received some feedback from an Accenture consultant who stated he was very impressed with our progress in the time we've had. While we were clearly far from perfect, it's great to hear the progress the teams have made in changing has been done well.

Part of the training I had been giving involved numerous one day training sessions and coaching other teams on Scrum and the agile process. I also worked as a Scrum Master on a group that is focusing on Hardware and the Supply Chain part of the product; this clearly provided numerous challenges, which unfortunately we didn't get to rectify before the project was disbanded as part of an organisation restructure. We had planned to set up an Agile Centre of Excellence with evangelists across the organisation.

Footnote: At end of April 2011, we all moved over to Nokia Siemens Networks from Motorola Solutions, as part of the Networks division sale. This work concluded when NSN disbanded the business unit.

Software Development Program Manager

Swindon Borough Council

Part of the leadership team for a £450m/year multi-dimensioned public sector organisation. 

My journey to being a local politician started after I bought my first house in Swindon. Having experienced a poor customer experience from the council, I was convinced there had to be opportunities to improve things. So when asked if I would stand, I felt it right to put my money where my mouth was!

Little did I know how much shoe leather was needed to run a political campaign! Many thousands of leaflets delivered and doors knocked on - pretty sure I didn't follow the corny political stereotype and kiss any babies, though :-)

In 2003 I was one of six under 30 elected to the council, all passionate about making the world a better place.

During my two terms (eight years) as a councillor, I learnt so many things. Arguably too much about street lighting and waste collection, but also important things like how to maintain democracy locally, how to make tough choices and often how not to get things done!

My time at the council was the start of my change and transformation experience. The lessons learnt inevitably helped me when I ran the agile transformation in Motorola and my current work with clients.

It also allowed me to tune my communication skills. For example, it would be common to go from talking with front-line staff in one meeting to the Chief Executive in the other. While the underlying need would be the same, how the message needed to be delivered must change. I hold the skill of being able to communicate effectively across an organisation's hierarchy close to my heart today.

When I look back at my time in this role, I am proud of my contributions to introducing recycling services across the entire borough and improving the borough's broadband services for residents in collaboration with Wiltshire Council and BT. Finally, as a Board member for a year, I enjoyed learning and improving the operation of Swindon Commercial Services, an arms-length delivery company.

Elected Councillor

Management had never been much of a career aspiration, as I had been happy to focus on my technical ambitions. However, while providing cover while our manager was on a well-deserved holiday, I was exposed to the other side of the organisation and was bitten by the bug.

Later when I had the opportunity to take over running the team, I jumped at the chance. As a team of an adjunct product to the main money-earning product, I learnt so much about the corporate world through being a big fish in a small pond! As an opportunity to learn, this environment was rich - I still draw on some of those learnings today with clients.

There were two themes to the team improvement that I undertook while in the post. Firstly we had inherited a backlog of quality issues, requiring us to work it down and deliver defect resolution within cycle time goals.

Secondly, I needed to grow the team dramatically to deliver multiple end-of-life technical replacement projects. The corporate strategy was to hire into the Beijing office, which I did, with the team growing four times in size. We successfully delivered and launched these new products to market, allowing the continued processing of orders without hindrance.

During this time, I learned about agile, which has become my north star for the rest of my career. I practically applied this knowledge and trialled Agile on some of our projects.

In addition, there was considerable on-the-job learning, with a new larger team, coordinating the project delivery, acting as a caretaker of the $1.1m CapEx budget, and managing the vendor relationship with Sun Microsystems.

I also read tons, listened to many podcasts and took management training. It took me from a crappy manager to a competent manager, guiding the team to get good results. I thoroughly enjoyed doing this role and started a journey in my career that I am very grateful for.

SysAdmin Software Development Manager

When the site strategy changed, the accountability to support and develop the OMC-R Sysadmin function moved to Swindon. As part of this, I picked up the database administration role. I needed to learn about the underlying database engine, Informix, and how the product used it.

Soon after we completed this transition, a significant defect caused an outage with one of Motorola's global telecom operator customers. I solidified my knowledge through the practical application of its resolution. 

We wanted more than just me with this knowledge, so I created and delivered training to other engineers and local account teams.

SysAdmin Database Engineer

Owing to staff movements, I took over the technical project management role. In addition to delivering part of the project, I needed to liaise with other team members across the UK, Ireland and China. I produced a Functional Test document to validate the desired outcome to enable an integrated delivery.

As my first time undertaking a technical project management role, it gave me invaluable learning about how people work differently and their attitude to work and delivering on their promises.

PSI Feature Champion

This was my job after graduating from university. Having had an interest in the burgeoning mobile telecoms industry and my final university dissertation on a Short Message Service (SMS) data protocol, I was pleased to be able to work in the industry.

The product set I worked on was the GSM network equipment. In essence, the boxes at the bottom of the radio cell towers. The team I joined was the 'Initialisation Process'; the software's job was to bring the equipment up, ensuring the communication channels could download software and configuration settings. 

The team were very generous with their time in mentoring me, and I developed life-long friendships with many of them. I learnt things like applying state machines and multi-threaded execution in a real-time embedded environment. Wo

On one project, I worked on the 'Executive', the proprietary operating system, to introduce changes to support a new generation of CPU.

As the world evolved, particularly post the dot-com bubble, we worked more with the growing Chinese team. Several came over to work with us for several months during the transition period. It was interesting to work alongside them and learn about their culture. Later in my career, I had the chance to travel regularly to China too.

I supported intra-department communication by developing intranet tools. I enjoyed the variety this gave me in my work and learning about user needs.

Software Engineer, Initialization Process

PC World

Having run a small business building and repairing computers while at college and in the early years of my university career, this role was perfect for me to help pay my bills as a student in my final year of university.

I worked at the front desk of the Customer Services area in PC World. Having technical conversations with customers benefited the store over just operating the till and processing transactions.

At the time, while a technical-oriented role, we needed to go through the Dixon Store Group sales training. Seeing how the process worked demonstrated how the chain had grown large and profitable. In addition, the formulaic approach meant anyone could quickly become effective.

As with other retail jobs I had had in the past, the store staff had great camaraderie, and it was a fun job.

Technical Customer Services

🦸🏻‍♂️ MY MISSION

To help organisations work productively at scale to get their operations working effectively to bring better quality products to market faster. I love the moment when people's jobs become easier & enjoyable.

🏢 WHO I WORK WITH

I work with enterprise-sized organisations to empower leaders with the skills, tools and processes they need for a profitable future. This applies to all sectors, but recently, these have included:

˃˃ Education
˃˃ Defence
˃˃ Finance
˃˃ SAAS

📈 WHAT MY CLIENTS ACHIEVE

Recent customers have gained,
➕ More than 50% improvement in their ability to deliver what they planned
➕ 80% reduction in time-to-market
➕an organisation-wide alignment which improves execution, maximises opportunities, and reduces the cost of doing business
➕ happier employees!

💪WHAT MAKES ME DIFFERENT

☞ I make it simple.
By its very nature, organisational change is complex. Human nature dictates that we don't want to do hard things. To help you demystify change, I'll make the complicated feel simple. 

☞ I don't do one-size-fits-all.
Processes and frameworks like the Scaled Agile Framework are powerful tools. But, like any framework, they only answer some of the questions. You'll often need a solution outside the playbook. Having helped make change happen in organisations across the globe, I'll help you find the answers you need so you can navigate change smoothly. 

🎙️WHAT OTHERS SAY

 "Whilst working with legacy systems that wouldn't talk to each other, our business struggled to put our customer at the heart of our business. Glenn was called in to help the exec team embrace agile ways of working and put the customer at the centre of our thinking. He helped us visualise and prioritise work, define value, create strong employee engagement, and bake quality into everything we did. The result? Improved customer satisfaction and embedded cultural change that has endured the test of time."

Gina Bradbury
UCAS

"Lack of alignment between execution and strategy meant that despite significant investment into R&D, our multi-national organisation needed to work on delivering value accurately and on time. Glenn was skilful in bringing all members of our teams together and ensured we always asked the right questions. As a result, we started to see roadmap commitments hit on time and to scope, morale improve, and return on investments achieved.”
 
Mark La Pensee
Portfolio Director

📞 READY TO TALK? 

Connect with me here on LinkedIn, email me glenn@nimbility.co, or visit my website https://www.nimbility.co and schedule a free conversation.

Glenn Smith

The Release Train Engineer role is challenging to master. 

Skilled at process, skilled at flow optimisation, and skilled in people.

That's why Tim Jackson, Gez Smith and I wrote The Release Training Engineer Handbook. 

If you are an RTE, it's your playbook to hone your skills.

If you are moving into the role, it helps you start running.

If you work alongside an RTE, you'll gain an awareness of what they are trying to achieve and how you can support them and the organisation to excel.

It will be released on 28 November by Packt.

Get your copy,

Amazon US: https://packt.link/Hl2ee
Amazon UK: https://packt.link/apYbM
Packt: https://packt.link/lTogY

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Keiron Skillett

Glenn Smith

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The Battle

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