About
Fifteen years in delivery. Now on the hiring side of it.
I am Harry Obeng, founder of Westcombe Talent. A PSM II certified Scrum Master and Agile Coach who spent fifteen years watching good programmes staffed badly, and decided to fix the part that was broken.
Why I started this
The recruiters were not dishonest. They simply could not tell.
In every organisation I worked in, the same thing happened. A programme would get funded, roles would open, and agency shortlists would arrive full of people who had the right words on their CV and none of the underlying capability. I would spend the first two sprints discovering that the “Senior Scrum Master” had never run a genuine retrospective, or that the Business Analyst could write requirements but could not hold their own with an architect.
That is not a moral failing on the recruiter’s part. It is a knowledge gap, and it is fixable, by putting someone who has actually done the job in charge of the assessment.
What we do differently
Every candidate we put forward has first had a working conversation with me: how they actually run delivery, how they handle dependencies, and what they have genuinely been accountable for. Each submission carries a written scorecard against the capabilities the role needs, so you can see the reasoning rather than take our word for it.
And we tell you when the answer is inconvenient. When the rate is below market, when the role as written will not attract anyone good, or when what you need is not the hire you have advertised.
Harry Obeng / Milton Keynes, UK
How we assess
Every shortlist is judged against the same five things.
Fifteen years inside retail, government, media and telecoms delivery programmes taught us what separates someone who has run the work from someone who has been near it. That judgement is written down rather than held in someone’s head, which is what makes it worth paying for.
01
Accountability, not proximity
Did this person own an outcome, or attend the meetings where someone else owned one? We ask what they were accountable for, what went wrong on their watch, and what they changed as a result. The specificity of the answer is usually the answer.
02
Craft in their own discipline
A Business Analyst who can hold their own with an architect. A Product Owner who can defend a prioritisation call under pressure. A Delivery Manager who can explain how a forecast was built. We probe the actual craft rather than the job title on the CV.
03
Dependencies and stakeholders
Most delivery failures are coordination failures. We test how someone handles competing priorities, a supplier who is not delivering, and a stakeholder who wants a date before there is a plan worth the name.
04
Empirical practice, not vocabulary
Whether they genuinely work from evidence: lead and cycle time, throughput, cumulative flow, and what they did when the numbers were uncomfortable. It is the quickest way to separate people who run delivery from people who have learned to talk about it.
05
Fit for your environment
Scale, governance and pace differ enormously between a regulated programme and a product team, and someone excellent in one can struggle in the other. Where we think the fit is wrong, you hear it before you spend an interview slot on it.
Credentials
Qualified, and still practising.
PSM II
Professional Scrum Master II, the advanced level of Scrum mastery, held alongside PSM I.
ISEB / ISTQB
Foundation Certificate in Software Testing, from seven years in software quality assurance.
Frameworks
Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, Lean, XP and Scrumban, applied across multi-team environments.
Empirical practice
Lead and cycle time, throughput, cumulative flow and Evidence-Based Management.
Evidence, not adjectives. Every candidate we submit arrives with a written assessment against the capabilities the role actually needs, and every market figure on this site is published with its source. You are welcome to challenge either.
How we work
Equal opportunities, and what we will not do.
We assess people against the capability the role actually needs, and nothing else. Shortlists are built on evidence of the work: what someone was accountable for, how they handled the hard parts, and what they would do differently.
Age, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religion or belief, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity play no part in that assessment, and no part in who gets put forward.
If a client asks us to filter on any of those, we will say no and explain why. We would rather lose the instruction than run that shortlist.
If you need an adjustment at any stage of a process we are running, tell us and we will arrange it. You do not need to explain why, and it will not change how you are assessed.
Next
Worth a conversation?
Whether you are hiring or between assignments, twenty minutes usually tells us both whether there is anything here.