My client had commited to provide an outsourced service to identify when family doctors made clinically innapropriate referrals of patients to hospital specialties and manage referrals appropriately based on their clinical validity.

The client was contractually required to start providing the service on February 1st, just 5 weeks after the contract was signed and required a new system be built to enable them to deliver the service.

The new system had to be deployed within the UK NHS secure network environment as it would store patient identifiable data.

The client was only able to provide a Product Owner and there was a requirement to hire contract developers to build the system.

Initially I had to identify and engage a number of contract developers to build the new referral management system, whilst also working with the Product Owner to develop an initial Product Backlog.

As the developers started, I became the ScrumMaster for the team, coaching the team and the stakeholders on the effective use of Scrum to build in feedback loops to ensure that the correct product was built, in the correct way. I also had to work with the team to help enable them to work from different geographic locations so that team members could maximise time at home with their families over the Christmas and New Year period whilst minimising development time lost and also to remove impediments as the development work was ongoing.

None of the team members except myself had any experience of working in agile teams.

Working with my established network, I identified a potential development team member on the first day and had engaged him on the second day having asked that he travel from his home in Spain to the UK to meet with myself and the Product Owner. The client also identified a tester who was based in India and arranged for him to fly to the UK immediately.

I worked with the Product Owner to form an initial Product Backlog and to identify which items were critical for the first release.

I also worked with the infrastructure team to get development environments created.

I then worked with the team to help them to use the feedback loops in Scrum to gain validated learning on a daily and weekly basis to shape the product development.

I also worked with the stakeholders to ensure that they understood the importance of providing feedback when invited and how to effectively collaborate with the development team.

The first release of the referral management system was deployed into the production environment (within the NHS secure environment) on 25th January, allowing time for referral centre staff training to take place.

The system continues to be used to this day (some 6 years later) and has saved the local NHS Trust over £1M per annum.