Dennis Nowland

Roles Held

• Delivery Manager – SQA (Oct 2025 – Mar 2026).
• Agile Coach / Senior Scrum Master – NICTS (Apr 2024 – Oct 2025).
• Agile Coach / Scrum Master – CDE, DCF, SmartDCC (Jan 2022 – Feb 2024)
• Agile Coach / Project Manager – M&T (Mar 2022- Oct 2022)
• Agile Coach – Glasgow Council (Jan 2022 - Apr 2022)

Tasks

• Organised Agile transformations and multi-team delivery across SQA, NICTS, and SmartDCC, cutting project delivery timelines by 20% and improving cross-team collaboration scores by 30%.
• Directed Agile transformations across six government programmes, resolving misaligned teams, unclear requirements, and inconsistent delivery practices.
• Updated flow efficiency by reducing average cycle time by 15–25% across Platform, Data, and Development teams.
• Grew delivery frequency by 10–20% by strengthening engineering practices, Git standards, release workflows, and communication frameworks.
• Redesigned Jira and Azure DevOps workflows, issue types, and templates, cutting rework by 25–28% and improving estimation accuracy.
• Created custom issue types and dependency management structures, saving 10% of delivery time by consolidating information into a single source of truth.
• Enabled Scrum of Scrums, Iteration Planning, capacity forecasting, and roadmap alignment across multi-team environments.
• Established clear Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD) criteria, which augmented backlog refinement and targeted estimation accuracy by 15%.
• Introduced Agile training programmes for 16 team members, resulting in a 25% increase in sprint velocity and increased predictability.
• Owned end-to-end Release Management, including readiness reviews, Go/No-Go forums, change requests, impact assessments, and rollback planning.
• Acted as Agile Project Manager for a 16-member delivery team during critical delivery periods.
• Promoted the use of AI Tools like CoPilot and ChatGPT to assist with daily tasks, from creating documentation to generating usable code in whatever language.
• Upgraded a multi-million-pound project with over 6 teams, including Security and PMO, to use on SAFe Agile with LeSS due to the size of the project, increasing the requirement breakdown phase with PI sessions.
• Consulting

Roles Held

• Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead (Mar 2016 – Apr 2022).
• Trainee Software Engineer ( Jan 2013 – Mar 2016)

Tasks

• Spearheaded Agile transformation for an 8-developer engineering team, introducing iterative process improvements and mentoring, resulting in a 15% sprint velocity increase.
• Held Agile ceremonies, strengthened Definition of Ready/Done, handled peer reviews, and optimised backend, achieving a 28% reduction in rework.
• Conducted Agile delivery for a PPV platform, ensuring stability and supporting 50,000+ purchases per hour during high-pressure events.
• Adapted engineering practices, coached team members, and implemented structured ceremonies, streamlining workflow and reducing defect leakage by 25%.
• Facilitated collaborative mind-mapping sessions and structured requirement breakdown, visualising requirements and identifying code reuse opportunities; saved 15 hours weekly in sprint refinement and planning meetings by visually showing dependencies and any risks in future work.
• Financial Service

• Developed end-to-end digital solutions for XX clients, leveraging Apache, PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter with AWS S3/EC2 deployment.
• Developed and automated a car maintenance centre’s booking system, enhancing operational efficiency by 30% and reducing appointment scheduling time by 40%.
• Improved website performance and UX using responsive design and Agile practices, resulting in 25% increase in user engagement.
• Maintained client relationships through reliable communication and consistent delivery, securing 10% long-term clients.
• Architected a custom e-commerce platform, integrating payment gateway, inventory management, and customer accounts, driving 15% increase in online sales.
• Freelance