How I work.
Most delivery problems arrive dressed as team problems. The team is late, so the team gets the attention: more meetings, tighter estimates, a recovery plan. Meanwhile the thing that actually determined the outcome happened months earlier and several levels up.
I help organisations see how work really moves, name what is getting in its way, and build the capability to keep fixing it once I have gone.
Where I usually come in#
You do not need to have diagnosed the problem before you call. These are the situations I am usually called into:
- Dates keep moving and nobody can explain why in terms anyone trusts
- Everything queues behind the same platform, the same specialist, the same approval
- Leadership wants commitments; the honest answer is a range, and nobody wants to say so
- The metrics are all green and delivery is visibly not fine
- Agile was adopted, ceremonies happen, and flow never improved
- You know roughly what good looks like and cannot see the route from here
If you recognise two or more of those, there is usually something worth looking at.
What I work on#
Two practices, usually tangled together in the same engagement.
Flow and delivery. Designing delivery systems that make outcomes predictable, and leaving teams who can run them. Lightweight Kanban and Lean practices sized to the actual problem. Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting, and reporting your leaders can act on. Practical work on bottlenecks, blockers, handoffs and queues.
Product. Helping teams discover, shape and prioritise work that customers value and the business needs. Discovery that mixes qualitative and quantitative evidence. Decision frameworks that frame trade-offs honestly, including the ones people would rather not see. Roadmaps that connect strategy to outcomes rather than output, and the shift from projects to products with measures that hold up.
What working together looks like#
Four shapes. Most engagements start with the first one, because it is cheap, quick, and tells us both whether the rest is worth doing.
A look at the system#
A few days. I map how work actually flows: where it starts, what it waits for, which services everything converges on, and what your own data already says about predictability. You get a clear picture of where the time goes and what to do first.
This is deliberately short and self-contained. If it turns out you do not need me after that, good.
Installing flow#
Weeks to months, part time. For organisations ready to change how work moves rather than how it is reported. Right-sizing work, managing flow rather than selecting it, forecasting probabilistically, and making the constraint visible before it bites.
I work alongside your people rather than above them, so the practice stays when I leave. No methodology to buy into, and nothing that stops working when the engagement ends.
Training#
Two days. I am an accredited Professional Kanban Trainer and have led training for 600+ product and delivery practitioners. Run a course in house, or take the modules that fit what your teams actually need:
- Applying Professional Kanban (APK)
- Applying Flow Metrics for Scrum (AFMS)
- Applying Metrics for Predictability (AMP)
- Applying Scaled Portfolio Kanban (ASPK)
- Accelerating Product Value (APV)
I also build purpose-made workshops when the curriculum is not the right fit, from discovery and strategy framing to OKR setting, decision facilitation and outcome-focused retrospectives. Either way, people leave with artefacts they can use on Monday.
A thinking partner#
Ongoing, by the hour. For practitioners and leaders who mostly need someone who has been there. No framework, no agenda, no homework. Somewhere to test an idea before you spend political capital on it.
Measuring what is actually happening#
Most teams have boards, dashboards and retrospectives, and still cannot say how work moves through their system or how reliable delivery is.
ValueFlow is the tooling I use for that: flow metrics, forecasting and contention analysis built for the way I work. It is included where an engagement needs it, and available on its own if you already know what you want to measure.
What you are left with#
This is the part I care about most.
Most consulting leaves two things behind: a report and a dependency. I am trying to leave one thing, which is capability. The engagement is working when your people are building competence faster than they need me, and it is finished when they do not need me at all.
In practice that means working alongside your teams rather than presenting at them, showing the reasoning rather than the conclusions, and measuring success by how quickly you stop calling.
What it costs#
- Consulting and diagnostic work: £1,800 per day
- ProKanban training: £1,200 for the two-day course
- Mentoring: £180 per hour
- ValueFlow: included where an engagement needs it, standalone pricing on request
Engagements run from a few days to several months. I would rather scope something small that proves useful than sell you a programme.
Start here#
Tell me what you are trying to move and where it is stuck. A couple of lines is plenty.