Stuart McQuade

Role Purpose: Spearheaded the mobilisation and optimisation of new Scrum teams within the Safety & Health domain to drive Global SaaS Transformation for 30,000 employees. Bridged the gap between initial business demand and technical execution by establishing structured ways of working and a multi-environment deployment strategy. Managed end-to-end release plan for Incident Management and Contractor modules, ensuring all new squads were built on a foundation of delivery readiness and strategic alignment to meet MVP in readiness for further iterations.

• Team Incubation & Scaling: Mobilised three cross-functional Agile Scrum Teams from inception to high-maturity by implementing a structured Sprint cadence. Coached teams to transition through the 'Forming-Storming' phases by establishing clear Working Agreements and Definition of Ready/Done standards, resulting in 100% Sprint Goal success rate within 90 days.
• Strategic Roadmap & "Value Hunting": Partnered with Product Owners to refine ambiguous goals into measurable product roadmaps and OKRs, applying prioritisation frameworks to rank backlog items, shifting culture from "feature-requesting" to high-impact delivery, reducing planning duration by 25%.
• Backlog Refinement & Mentoring: Partnered with Product Owner & BA’s to transform ambiguous goals into high-quality Epics and User Stories via Agile Story Mapping. Coached the team on vertical slicing to ensure all items meet rigorous Definition of Ready status, reducing development blockers by 30% and streamlining the Discovery-to-Delivery pipeline.
• Operational Excellence: Tailored Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) to maximise flow and predictability. Established a transparent "Inspect and Adapt" culture that drove 40% increase in retrospective participation and established a direct lineage between daily tasks and long-term strategic goals.
• Cross-Functional Communication Architecture: Orchestrated a new enterprise-wide communication structure to provide full visibility and real-time progress reporting across disparate business units. This initiative eliminated information silos and established a "single source of truth," ensuring executive stakeholders remained aligned on project health, roadmap milestones, and delivery velocity.
• Agile Performance Dashboards: Established and standardised for all business units and leadership teams, reporting on Sprint Say/Do ratios, Velocity stability, and Cycle Time. These metrics provided a 'single source of truth' for executive leadership, shifting the reporting culture from anecdotal updates to data-driven insights that improved forecast accuracy.

Role Purpose: Directed the mobilisation and cadence for three new onshore/offshore Scrum teams within a high-priority Mortgage value stream. Established a consistent delivery framework to bridge development and business leadership, aligning backlogs with strategic OKRs to decommission legacy on-premise infrastructure and transition to AWS/Pega cloud platforms.

• Mobilised Scrum teams: Orchestrated the formation of self-organising, autonomous teams by establishing DoR/DoD standards, facilitated 'Being vs Doing Agile' workshops, and authoring relevant training materials to institutionalise 'Inspect and Adapt' methodologies.
• Strategic PI & Roadmap Alignment: Facilitated quarterly PI Planning and dependency mapping to translate complex objectives into executable roadmaps. Ensured 100% alignment between technical capacity and stakeholder expectations, hitting critical "End of Service Life" deadlines.
• Backlog Mentoring & Flow: Coached POs/BAs in Agile Story Mapping and Vertical Slicing to transform ambiguous goals into "Ready" Epics. Established a rigorous Definition of Ready, reducing development blockers by 30% and streamlining the Discovery-to-Delivery pipeline.
• Delivery Framework: Drove operational excellence by coaching teams in Agile principles and the Scrum framework, facilitating high-alignment sprint sessions and data-driven retrospectives to foster a culture of continuous improvement and stakeholder-aligned delivery.
• Accelerated Cloud & MVP Delivery: Orchestrated "Enabler" and Pega squads to launch new AWS/CI-CD environment and Case Manager MVP in 4–6 months. Beat projected lead times by 33% through "Test and Learn" cycles and rapid React UI iterations.
• Performance Benchmarking & Governance: Established a data-driven culture using Say/Do ratios, Lead/Cycle Time. Used these metrics to identify bottlenecks in the Pega pipeline, achieving a 100% Sprint Goal success rate with high predictability.
• Change Leadership & Process Automation: Fostered an "Inspect and Adapt" culture across hybrid teams, utilising Kanban and Hackathon cycles to automate digital mortgage processing. Bridged the gap between technical tasks and tangible end-user benefits.

Role Purpose: Directed the delivery of large-scale cloud transformations and digital propositions within highly regulated banking environments and focused on re-platforming legacy infrastructure to GCP/Cloud-native applications, streamlining originations, and launching innovative member-centric lending and savings products.

• Mobilised Scrum teams: Orchestrated the formation of self-organising, autonomous teams by establishing DoR/DoD standards, facilitating 'Being and Doing Agile' workshops, and authoring relevant training materials to institutionalise 'Inspect and Adapt' methodologies.
• Cloud Finance Platform (Lloyds Bank): Orchestrated the build of two feature teams focused on rebuilding the core finance platform on GCP. Led the development of API capabilities to facilitate the migration of all banking payment types, including Faster Payments, ensuring high-availability and modernised cloud-native security.
• Later Life Mortgage Proposition (Nationwide): Guided the end-to-end integration of later life lending solutions into the core mortgage portfolio. Streamlined operational workflows to simplify the member experience, directly supporting the strategic goal of increasing engagement within the older life-stage demographic.
• Savings MVP & Real-Time Onboarding (Nationwide): Spearheaded the launch of a Savings MVP for Real-Time Instant ISA account openings. Enabled seamless, "straight-through" processing for new members, significantly reducing account opening friction and meeting modern customer expectations for instant service.
• Current Account Re-Platforming (Nationwide): Directed the migration of current account products from on-premise to cloud applications. Enhanced scalability and reduced operational costs while integrating new value propositions, including cross-sell capabilities for savings and credit products.
• UX & Journey Optimisation: Optimised the end-to-end customer onboarding experience by introducing mediated journeys for new customers. Utilised a data-driven "Inspect and Adapt" approach to refine user interfaces, leading to higher customer satisfaction scores and streamlined originations.
• Quality-Led Metrics: Implemented a rigorous "Definition of Done" tracking system, measuring Escaped Defects and Technical Debt trends during the GCP re-platforming. Correlated team velocity with Value Realisation metrics, proving to bank leadership that the move to cloud-native APIs directly accelerated "Straight-Through Processing" for customers.
• Delivery Framework: Drove operational excellence by coaching teams in Agile principles and the Scrum framework, facilitating high-alignment sprint sessions and data-driven retrospectives to foster a culture of continuous improvement and stakeholder-aligned delivery.

Strategic Agile Delivery for Enterprise Clients: Jaguar Land Rover, G4S, & Unipart

Role Purpose: Managed complex, multi-million-pound digital transformation projects for global enterprise clients. Served in a hybrid Scrum Master and Project Manager capacity to drive cloud migrations, workflow optimisations, and large-scale organisational change initiatives.

• Global Change Programme (G4S): Directed a high-impact, one-year global migration to Google Workspace across 120 countries. Managed the technical migration and business change strategy to consolidate multiple legacy platforms into a single unified solution, significantly improving global collaboration and reducing IT overhead.
• GCP Re-Platforming (Unipart): Orchestrated the end-to-end transition of legacy on-premise platforms to a modern GCP cloud-based backend and UI architecture. Delivered a scalable, high-performance infrastructure that modernised Unipart’s supply chain technology and enhanced system reliability.
• Workflow Optimisation (Jaguar Land Rover): Guided the design and implementation of bespoke workflow solutions, automating manual processes to enhance operational productivity. Partnered with cross-functional stakeholders to ensure technical solutions aligned with JLR’s rigorous manufacturing and business efficiency standards.
• Hybrid Delivery Model Architecture: Conceptualised and implemented a bespoke "Agile-at-Scale" delivery model that successfully blended structured Waterfall governance with Scrum execution. This framework ensured 100% compliance with strict corporate and regulatory requirements while accelerating the pace of delivery and maintaining transparency for the business leadership group.
• Deployment & Adoption Analytics: Designed a reporting framework to track the technical migration and user adoption rates across 120 countries for G4S. Utilised Flow Efficiency and Release Burn-down metrics to manage the high-complexity JLR workflow solutions, ensuring global change programmes remained on track and within governance guardrails.
• Managed stakeholder expectations, fostered good working relationships.
• Implemented Scrum framework, guided teams towards achieving goals.
• Coached team members, boosted their understanding of Agile principles.
• Led sprint planning sessions, ensured alignment with business objectives.