Hello
Michael O'Reilly
Agile Delivery Lead in Bournemouth. Ten years taking software from idea to live — through PMO, QA, product and engineering leadership — currently leading a cross-functional team in a UK central government department. I stay close to the technical work, and build things of my own to keep it that way.
10+ years building and delivering products 11 site tools built and published
Projects
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Say It, Don’t Say It
Say it face to face
Two teams, a spinner and a thirty-second clock. The spinner picks one of the four values of the Agile Manifesto, one team-mate’s phone deals them its vocabulary — working software, customer collaboration — and they describe each word to their team without saying it. The learning is in the thirty seconds of explaining what the words actually mean, out loud, to colleagues. A ten-minute opener for a retro.
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Retros Against Humanity
Reflect, then tune and adjust
Box UK's agile game, built as a live room for a remote team. A prompt lands on every screen, everyone writes a real retro point for it at the same moment, and the answers come back with nobody's name on them. It breaks the round-robin, and it gets the uncomfortable point said out loud.
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Agile Battleships
Prefer the shorter timescale
The exercise I use to argue for shipping small and often, playable in the browser. Three rounds against the same fleet with the same thirty shots and the same clock — the only thing that changes is how often you find out whether the plan is working. Hand-written, no libraries.
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Planning Poker
Emerges from self-organising teams
A real estimation tool, not a demo: a team opens a room, shares a link, and everyone votes from their own phone. Cards stay hidden until the last person is in — and not just on screen, since nobody else's browser is ever sent your card. The tool shows the spread and who went high and low, then leaves the number to the team.
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How This Site Is Built
Continuous attention to technical excellence
The architecture of this site, written at two depths on one page: one program at the edge of the network, no build step, a live server per room that decides for itself what each person may see, feature switches that fail towards showing you more rather than less, and more than forty gates before anything ships. Choose plain English or the technical detail.
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OpenFlow Metrics
Reflect, then tune and adjust
Flow metrics and forecasting for a team's own tracker, given away rather than sold. Thirteen charts, and a written-down expectation — "85% of our work finishes in eight days or less" — that the tool checks against reality and turns into a list of the work at risk right now. All of the arithmetic happens in the browser, which is what makes it free to run and keeps the data where it already was.
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Buy-to-Let Deal Finder
Deliver working software frequently
A private tool that turns a property listing into the sums a buy-to-let buyer actually needs — the likely rent, stamp duty, a lender's stress test, tax, and the return on the cash put in — then scores it out of 100 with its reasons and red flags on show. Planned on a Friday, built with Claude milestone by milestone over the next three days, and every figure checked to the penny against sums worked out by hand.