Daniel McDermott

As part of the UK's move to a full fibre broadband initiative, known as the All-IP Migration Program, I am currently working as a Scrum Master with the Networks division of the BT Group working to shut down the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). In order to help the Migration program to meet its hard deadline of switching off the PSTN by December 2025 I am responsible for:

• Providing coaching and leadership support for leaders and all squads to help guide them on how to maximize their efforts to build Data specific products
• Leading program/project planning to ensure cross-team dependencies are understood and managed
• Documenting and highlighting risks and making these transparent via Jira and following up to ensure action is taken
• Collating and consolidating updates on team delivery to stakeholders and senior leadership
• Using all available data to inform next steps and to help deliver incremental value
• Organizing and facilitating all sprint ceremonies as well as coaching squads to self-organize and grow into fully cross-functional teams.
• Working closely with product owners to actively manage all backlogs and prioritize based on interactions with all customers
• Actively running Agile chapter meetings to share and learn best practice with other colleagues

As part of my role within BT Enterprise, I provided support with the coaching of the Tribe Leads with the creation of the governance and reporting structure for 8 cross-functional squads within a SAFe Agile environment. This is to help enable the delivery of improvements to the Broadband Repair journey within a High-Volume Journeys program. Changes within the High-Volume Journey is key to improving the Broadband repair experience for our B2B customer base within a £100m+ large organization.

• Facilitated Scrum framework – sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily scrums, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives.
• Assessed each scrum team member's responsibilities and delegated tasks to balance each employee's workload.

Changes introduced include ensuring that aggressive call reduction targets are met as part of the journey to improve the customer journey billing experience.

• Guiding and coaching Scrum Teams on Agile practices and effective use of this methodology.
• Helping to guide and improve teams by focusing on continuous improvement
• Facilitating and supporting all Scrum events including sprint retrospectives, planning and reviews.
• Meeting with stakeholders and product owners to help shape and define epics and user stories.
• Holding daily stand-ups to go through user stories to highlight and helping to ensure that deadlines are adhered to.
• Defining and documenting risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies throughout and communicating potential risks to stakeholders and offering solutions.
• Standardised production of RESTful APIs and MSA style wrappers to existing SOAP based APIs. API were produced or amended within 4-weeks.
• Improving average velocity of work completed by I Pay customer journey squad by 50% throughout 2020 and ensuring that these results were linked with call reduction targets thus clearly showing value delivered.

Responsible for management of component team including providing coaching on embedding Agile fundamentals. Implemented new Agile techniques to help manage a high work in progress. Changes were introduced to ensure that aggressive financial efficiency targets relating to the automation of various operational processes are met within a large organization in the Financial Services industry.

• Delivering projects on time within agreed acceptance criteria to help transition from Waterfall to Agile project methodology
• Securing internal approval for fixed and hourly project fees and monitoring resource time to ensure project completion in line with expected costs.
• Maintained open communication by presenting regular updates on project status to customers.
• Reducing costs by £130 per hour and increasing resource availability helping to implement new data management tools which automated previously manual processes and which led to savings of £100,000 per annum
• Leading teams of 5 people to transition high-volume accounts worth in excess of £1 million from London to Manchester 1 month ahead of schedule, enabling other teams to work on new client ventures
• Managing medium sized project worth in excess of £10,000 transfer 20 client employees to APAC, Europe and America, achieving completion within 4 weeks and on budget.
• Recruited and oversaw personnel to achieve performance and quality targets

• Delivering expert technical immigration advice and guidance to corporate clients
• Managing daily workflow by delegating cases to staff based on skills, qualifications and experience

• Kept detailed notes of all correspondence with clients and updated details in company's computer system.
• Served as point of contact for clients regarding follow-up, meeting scheduling and responses to questions.