Case studies

What I've delivered in previous roles.

Examples from my 30 years’ experience in software delivery and leadership, demonstrating my personal track record of driving improvements and delivering results.

2026 Enact

34% / 38.5% reduction in median lead time / cycle time, in three months

Improving delivery flow across two software teams

The challenge

The department had capable engineers and QA testers, but needed a more consistent way to coordinate work and resolve delivery problems. Recurring issues remained open between retrospectives, and the teams needed clearer sprint goals, completion criteria, backlog priorities, and Product Owner involvement. Leaders also needed better visibility into where work was slowing down.

What I did

Acting as Product Lead and Scrum Master for two delivery teams, I improved day-to-day coordination, introduced sprint goals and backlog prioritisation, followed through on retrospective actions to remove blockers, and clarified the responsibilities of Scrum Masters and Product Owners. I extended that coaching to the wider department, and led a direct team of eight — engineers and QA, some based offshore — through weekly 1-2-1s and day-to-day support. In parallel, I built and deployed internal tooling reporting Azure DevOps flow metrics — including lead time, cycle time, bottlenecks, and bug origin — giving the department and Senior Leaders delivery visibility across six teams that it hadn't had before.

The result

Over three months, median lead time fell by 34% and cycle time by 38.5%, measured directly from the flow-metrics dashboard. These measures track the overall elapsed time for work and the time spent progressing it once started. The dashboard also gave leaders visibility into bottlenecks across six teams, helping them see where to focus improvement efforts.

"The improvements around Scrum practices, sprint goals, backlog refinement, definition of done, and acceptance criteria are beginning to give the teams a more consistent way of working. Your experience in this area is evident, and your willingness to share that experience more widely through the Scrum Master meetings and with other Product Leads is valuable."
— Senior Management Team member, Enact

2021–2026 Trimble (UK) Ltd — Viewpoint for Projects

"Unheard of" how the Senior Engineering Manager described the release cadence

Turning ad hoc releases into a reliable two-week cadence

The challenge

The team responsible for APIV2, the gateway API to Trimble's flagship construction document management platform, had no consistent release cadence.

What I did

As Team Lead and Scrum Master, I ran the full set of Scrum ceremonies and worked with the Product Owner to establish a CI/CD-oriented release rhythm. I built a genuinely collaborative team culture — daily pairing, open code review, honest retrospectives — and used it to onboard four new engineers joining from overseas, who were contributing code almost immediately with no disruption to delivery. I also designed and introduced a new automated test-comparison approach, "Deep Compare," which the team adopted and continued developing afterwards.

The result

A regular two-week release cadence, trending toward weekly. The internal QA department switched to the new API in preference to the legacy one, citing real time savings per test cycle. Four newly onboarded engineers were contributing code almost immediately, with zero disruption to delivery cadence. I was awarded Trimble's "Inspiration Award for Engineering" in June 2022.

"Mark played a key role in the delivery of regular API releases. Was able to lead the team towards a two-weekly cadence — unheard of on this platform! … To release so frequently with high quality is a great achievement by the team, and Mark."
— Senior Engineering Manager, Trimble

2010 United Lincolnshire NHS Trust

On schedule beta delivered against a fixed deadline, from zero team

From a standing start to a working system in three months

The challenge

The Trust needed to replace a paper-based process for tracking patient case notes as they moved between hospitals, against a fixed external deadline — with no delivery team yet in place.

What I did

I built the team first: recruiting two additional contract developers at short notice, interviewing them myself, to get a three-person delivery team moving from nothing. Rather than working from a specification handed down by IT, I ran requirements sessions directly with the people who'd use the system — clinical staff, their medical secretaries, and senior Trust management — to define the feature set and agree priorities as the project progressed. I set up the full technical environment from scratch and introduced proper source control and test-driven development, neither of which had been standard practice on the project before.

The result

A working beta, delivered on schedule against the deadline that drove the whole engagement — built on requirements drawn directly from the people who'd use it, not a spec written in isolation.

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