“Ahmad’s practical and pragmatic approach spans between leadership education, organizational change, agile and scrum big ideas, agile practices and key development techniques. ”
“Ahmad is one of those rare consultants that truly wants to understand our business and always shows us a great deal of empathy in the process. He continuously challenges Lady Geek to ensure we remain brutally focused on our mission.”
“Listens very well. Doesn’t make stuff up. Wants to make you/team successful first and foremost. Cares passionately about your agenda. Most approachable person I know. Expert at responding in a way that makes you feel that he is genuinely interested in you. Consistently honours trust. No back channel. Values people over things. Because of above is able to get to the real heart of the issue AND get the team to self solve (with guidance). Team believe he is there for them. Networks very well. Good “glue” person”
I specialize in organizational transformation:
- From waterfall to agile product development
- From project management to product development culture
- From command and control management to self-organization
My coaching model
- Start with a coffee and conversation
- Initial strategy workshop and interviews
- Initial organizational change (1 month)
- Quarterly Follow-up Sessions (Two Weeks)
What I believe
- I don't believe in 'land and expand'. I am not here to leave an army of consultants behind me
- I work with the people in the organization as my team
- I believe in empathy
- There is no cookie cutter approach
- Too much change at once is disruptive
- My core values: Trustworthiness, impact, authenticity
Functional areas I have coached
- FX Payments technology
- Credit Trading Technologies
- Derivatives operations technology
- Securities operations technology
- Middle office technology
- Volker Reporting
- Physical Commodities Trading
- FX Options front to back platform re-engineering
Case Study (Triple point)
“Thanks a lot for your help in mentoring, coaching, and leading our team to adopt the Agile methodology. It is fair to say that I was resistant to change at first but over time and with your patience I grew to understand and embrace the changes as new opportunities. You have a good way with you - honest, open and funny at times which is important. In addition, you also provide good real world examples to support your training which helps us digest and absorb the proposed changes. I love how this change in the work process enables people to be the best they can and also empowers people to do more if they want to which breaks down some of those classical hierarchical structures we are traditionally used to. You persevered and focused on what was most important at the time and in retrospect I can see the pace at which you introduced change was well measured.”
“Here at Triple Point we wanted to overhaul our software delivery model so we could release our software more frequently, more flexibly, with reduced waste and increased quality. We were starting from a waterfall model, a siloed organization, 8-12 month long release cycles, long stabilization periods for the software and constant build up of technical debt. This was generally resulting in inconsistent project completion and client frustration.
A large transformation was required.
We wanted to introduce agile practices and move to scrum to build quality into our processes, improve our core delivery skills, remove organizational barriers and uncover and then remove technical, knowledge and organizational debt in all forms.
We met Ahmad thanks to previous work done by the ION group, owners of Triple Point, with Scrum Alliance coaches. Ahmad was highly recommended by a coach who had established a high reputation at ION through previous agile transformations. We were immediately impressed with Ahmad’s enthusiasm, knowledge, alignment with our thoughts, ability to learn quickly about our organization and availability to take up such a big challenge.
Most of the work was done in Pune, India, where the core of our 200+ strong development force is located.
In two separate 2-week visits within a 4 month period, Ahmad managed to flip the organization to scrum, and put them on a path of self-improvement, which already delivered visible results.
He was able to work with multiple scrum teams in parallel with a large contingent of leaders and product managers, and a newly formed group of scrum masters.
We can now afford to deliver quarterly releases, we have caught up significantly on technical debt, have reduced middle-management by moving individuals back to key development functions or to key leadership roles, and our last version went live within 3 weeks of release date, which is a massive improvement.
And more importantly we have put a roadmap of improvement in motion, so the organization is eager to go through the next challenges.
Ahmad’s practical and pragmatic approach spans between leadership education, organizational change, agile and scrum big ideas, agile practices and key development techniques. ”
Anonymous survey after a client engagement
"Emotive", "inspirational", "great", "enabling", "positive", "fun", "inclusive", "efficacious", "pragmatic", "effective"