Amy Stevens

I moved into the Agile coach role just before the pandemic hit so as well as finding my way in my new role, I also had to adapt to working from home and all of the new technology and skills that this required.

Currently work within a high-functioning team of amazing Agile coaches, where collaboration and support are our ethos.

• Supported the introduction of Kanban at the Portfolio level across the organisation
• Introduced and continuously evolved a scaled Agile approach, utilising and adapting aspects of SAFe and LeSS for several multi-team initiatives
• Integral in helping to build a person-first culture at YouView
• Helped to build a high-functioning Agile coaching team, with a focus on the best way to support the 20 engineering teams across the business, flexing and adapting our approach as required
• Supporting the broader Delivery function in applying an Agile mindset
• Working with various Scrum teams in helping to build their understanding of Agile practices and the importance of continuous improvement
• Worked with multiple teams to apply the Kanban method, often over the top of the existing Scrum framework, and supported them in this journey, stepping back at the point at which they were able to support themselves
• Facilitated assessments within teams to help them understand the difference between Scrum and Kanban and decide on the best approach for them
• Applying a training, mentoring, or coaching approach, after having assessed the need within a team, on the value of continuous, sustainable delivery in teams and team-of-teams
• Facilitating Scrum-of-scrums and other scaled Agile sessions across multiple teams
• Stepping into the role of scrum master as required, to help teams become more efficient and able to have autonomy over their ways of working
• Supported in founding a working group to form the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive steering board, alongside various members of the exec team, to educate and embed our DE&I strategy across YouView, resulting in empowering individuals across the organisation
• Chaired DE&I steering board during its infancy, designing and facilitating workshops to help define our objectives
• Integral in elevating these objectives to the same level as our business objectives
• Current chair of DE&I Committee
• Transformed the DE&I Committee from being a group of individuals, to a strong and performant team, utilising and adapting the Team Canvas to introduce a mission statement, in which we could all believe, and a team working agreement to underpin a team ethos, and help us to hold ourselves to account
• Identified a lack of understanding of neurodiversity across the organisation and responded to this by setting up a series of sessions to introduce and educate. I then worked with the DE&I committee to invite speakers, who live with various neurodivergent conditions, to talk about their experiences.
• Helped to found a Women at YouView group, to offer a support network to women across the organisation.
• Introduced a coaching Dojo, where we could discuss and support various topics
• Offered 121 and team mentoring and coaching
• Directly line managed a Scrum master and helped to support them in being as effective as possible in their role, for both the benefit of the organisation and the teams, as well as the individual

• Worked within various Scrum and Kanban teams, to guide on Agile principles
• Completed project lifecycles through strategic milestone setting, planning and review.
• Liaised with product developers, owners and experts to maximise project potential.
• Balanced conflicting priorities to achieve project completion within constraints.
• Assigned staff and resources to maximise budget allocations.
• Coordinated cross-functional teams to deliver timely, under-budget technical projects.
• Allocated work and monitored progress against aims, timeframes and budgets.
• Defined project scope and deliverables to meet stakeholder and business needs.
• Managed change, risk and delivery blockers to achieve project objectives.
• Identified process, procedure and architecture opportunities to streamline project operations.

Leading a team of developers following the principles of Agile Lean:

• Facilitating daily stand-ups
• Managing our product backlog
• Facilitating all planning meetings, which include brand digital directors, editors and designers
• Working with brands to confirm our product strategies
• Analysing qualitative and quantitative data to highlight areas which require our focus and where necessary, presenting these to the digital director
• Focussing on the user and thinking of new ways in which to engage them and deliver high-quality and useful functionality
• Working with the ads team to develop new ad types which resulted in Parallax ads on Wallpaper and Marie Claire
• Ensuring quality control before a release, which resulted in whole team being responsible for testing, reducing thenumber of bugs, and preventing developers from testing their own work
• Maintaining a central board where details of all deliverables and their status' are tracked
• Defining KPIs for all deliverables and measuring the teams' performance against them

• Leading a team of four, with one direct report, including one senior tester, one developer, and two senior developers, following the principles of Agile Lean, with elements of Scrum
• Facilitating daily stand-ups
• Managing our product backlog
• Facilitating all planning meetings, which include numerous digital directors
• Assisting in confirming our team and product strategy
• Analysing statistics to highlight areas that require our focus and where necessary, presenting these to the digital directors
  Focussing on the user and thinking of new ways in which to engage them and deliver high-quality and useful functionality
• Working with the ads team to develop new ad types - gallery ad which had a CTR of 5%
• Ensuring quality control before a release, including introducing new processes where necessary. The result of this was whole team inclusion in the testing process which resulted in fewer bugs
  Maintaining a central board where details of all deliverables and their status' are tracked
• Confirming KPIs for all deliverables and ensuring these are followed through
• Following the principles of Lean methodology
• Building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders
• Building a development plan for my direct report and mentoring them on their career path, using weekly 1-2-1s
• Managing central initiatives throughout the entire department, including introduction and thorough understanding of new initiatives and providing weekly reports to the key stakeholders.

Leading the central development team following the principles of Agile Scrum:

• Acting as Scrum Master for the team
• Facilitating daily stand-up
• Removing impediments that obstruct team members from delivering user stories
• Monitoring the burndown chart to ensure the team is on track
• Writing user stories
• Facilitating sprint planning meetings
• Ensuring team are not pressured into committing to more than they feel they can deliver within sprint planning meetings
• Problem-solving to ensure delivery of MVP
• Creating sprint documentation
• Managing and keeping the board up-to-date
• Managing product backlogs
• Facilitating all planning meetings
• Running sprint retrospective and review
• Ensuring quality control of all products before release
• Creating monthly reports of the team's delivery and commitments for senior management
• Introducing new processes where necessary to improve the running of the sprint
• Planning new projects, scoping requirements, and arranging resourcing
• Building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders
• Creating and updating roll-out plans
• Writing test plans, when required
• Testing, when required
• Managing roll-out of cross-divisional initiatives (CDIs) into brand teams by liaising with internal teams
• Creating weekly reports with an overview of all CDIs and major projects for the entire department and senior management
• Occasionally presenting to thedepartment an update of central team's delivery and commitments in monthly review
• Managing releases of the internal CMS

• Supporting the product manager in running the team sprints
• Assisting in the facilitation of CMS workshops to understand the improvements needed to be made for the brand teams
• Writing user guides for the CMS and ensuring they stay up to date as improvements and new functionality are released
• Acting as Scrum Master for the team
• Facilitating daily stand-up
• Removing impediments that obstruct team members from delivering user stories
• Monitoring the burndown chart to ensure the team is on track
• Writing user stories
• Facilitating sprint planning meetings
• Ensuring team are not pressured into committing to more than they feel they can deliver within sprint planning meetings
• Problem-solving to ensure delivery of MVP
• Creating sprint documentation
• Managing and keeping the board up-to-date
• Facilitating sprint retrospective
• Building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders
• Assisting the project manager in creating roll-out plans and keeping them up-to-date
• Assisting senior test analyst in ensuring quality control of all products before release
• Introducing new processes where necessary to improve the running of the sprint
• Managing roll-out of cross-divisional initiatives (CDIs) into brand teams by liaising with internal teams
• Creating weekly reports with an overview of all CDIs and major projects for the entire department and senior management
• Managing of internal CMS helpdesk; Dealing with calls and queries; managing resolution of all issues and liaising with brand teams

• Assisting the Senior Project Manager in planning new digital projects, scoping requirements, and arranging resourcing
• Updating client website project plans
• Liaising with internal teams, clients and third-party suppliers
• Creating user guides and training clients on the in-house content-managed system
• Quality control of websites in production against original designs, comparing across browsers to ensure designs are followed
• Monitoring and logging of bugs found and assigning to relevant team members for resolution
• Carrying out functional testing and creating test plans based on functional requirements
• Creating and maintaining timesheets for the web development team
• Raising invoices and coordinating the processing of incoming invoices
• Assisting with other projects as instructed by Directors on an ad hoc basis