Phil Thompson

I’m a delivery professional with over 13 years of experience. I have a history of delivering value in complex and dynamic environments and have coached many teams across a diverse range of products and domains.

I have a strong background in agile methods and practices, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean, and I hold the Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) credentials from Scrum Alliance®. These skills are complemented by real-world Product Owner experience.

My mission is to enable organisations and teams to solve complex problems and deliver value to their customers and stakeholders. I operate at both team and enterprise level, adapting to the context and needs of each situation. I believe in sustainable flow, continuous improvement, and end-to-end delivery of value, and I help facilitate this by making progress and waste transparent.

Senior Delivery Manager/Temporary Product Owner - Contract (Nando’s)

I joined Nando’s to help the existing delivery team build a ‘delivery’ capability from scratch in the domain we were operating in. This involved working with a team of 3 Delivery Leads across 10 teams putting in place new ways of working that previously didn’t exist in the domain. We gathered feedback on the ‘health’ of the teams and used this feedback to decide where to focus our efforts.

In my time at Nando’s I helped multiple teams deliver value across a diverse range of products and teams in the employee domain. This included a careers website, a mandatory training tracking app, Workday platform support and a learning management system trial.

In addition to this I temporarily covered the Product Owner role in a team for 3 months while they searched for a permanent replacement.

Scrum Master/Agile Coach (Arm)

During my time here I expanded my role from ScrumMaster to include multiple ways of working outside of pure Scrum. This involved guiding and coaching the teams to transition from using a predominantly SAFe inspired framework to a blended agile ‘custom’ approach using a range of principles and practices.

My biggest achievement was to spearhead kanban adoption with two teams that were finding Scrum frustrating. I helped them apply new concepts such as Little’s Law, focus on flow and WIP limits. I developed continuously rolling plans to balance continuous delivery with the stakeholder requirement for longer term plans. Having left sprints behind, I devised new dashboards to visualise priority and progress based on our cycle times, throughput and work in progress.

I created a learning environment, taking guidance from other practices such as lean, DevOps, XP, and scrum. The team experimented and continuously worked towards agile maturity. Along the way we shared our learnings with the agile community in Arm.

Scrum Master (Domino’s Pizza Group UK & Ireland)

January 2017 to October 2019

I worked with multiple teams to enable regular delivery of value to our eCommerce customers and Franchisees across several applications. I facilitated, supported, coached and mentored Scrum teams to help them continually improve and mature. I engaged regularly with the Product team, stakeholders and tech leads to provide a mutually beneficial environment for delivering value early and often.

I have the Advanced Certified Scrum Master certification and am also PRINCE2 qualified.