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Founded in 2017, we are a UK-based data analytics business working with organisations across Europe and North America. Our team of data scientists and software delivery veterans apply data science to the challenge of optimising software delivery.
Our core belief is that software delivery is a complex engineering process – and like all complex processes – measurement is vital to optimise productivity, improve predictability and reduce risk.
The challenge lies in synthesising insight – both from the hard data residing within the toolsets used across the end-to-end delivery process and via feedback collated from engineers themselves – and presenting that insight in customisable forms to users from team level upwards.
This combination of hard underlying data and engineer feedback is very powerful and can transform software delivery outcomes so that teams:
Charlie Ponsonby
Co-Founder and CEO
Martin Blackburn
Chairman
Will Lytle
Chief Operating Officer
Jef Vratny
CTO
Luke Thomas
Head of Product
Charlie started his career as an economist working on trade policy in the developing world, before moving to Andersen Consulting’s Strategy practice in 1992.
In 1996 he joined the Operating Board of Selfridges, before moving to Open interactive TV in 1999 and then Sky in 2001 where he was Marketing Director until leaving to found Simplifydigital in 2007.
Simplifydigital was three times in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 and grew to become the UK’s largest TV, broadband and home phone comparison service, powering clients including Dixons-Carphone, uSwitch and Comparethemarket. It was acquired by Dixons Carphone plc in April 2016.
He co-founded Plandek with Dan in October 2017. Charlie was educated at Cambridge University. He lives in London and is married with three children.
Martin is an accomplished technology leader with more than 35 years’ experience having held positions at Rackspace, Marconi, Logica, HP, EDS and IBM. Throughout his career, he has led organisations to achieve significant performance focusing on customer success, execution and innovation. Most recently, he was Managing Director EMEA at Rackspace. Previously he was Executive Chair for a number of companies within Marlin Equity Partners. Before Marlin, he held positions at the global technology business for IBM in Europe as General Manager, Chief Operating Officer for Europe, General Manager for Benelux and UK & Ireland where he was responsible for outsourcing, consulting, cloud and security services.
Will is a senior technology leader, specialising in digital transformation and leading cross-functional delivery teams. He has over 15 years of global experience built on digital delivery expertise, operating models, developing talent, and helping businesses shape and deliver technology-enabled business transformations.
Will joined the Plandek leadership team from Deloitte in March 2019. He is passionate about helping our clients build high performing, motivated delivery teams, and works closely with them to identify their biggest delivery challenges, form meaningful objectives, and find the right metrics to drive success.
Jef has been building, leading and mentoring engineering teams around the world for over 20 years. His experience has spanned industries, technologies and cultures. Through the adoption of Agile methodologies, DevOps practices and Cloud technologies he’s enabled numerous companies to deliver successful outcomes.
Jef’s passion for the continuous improvement of people, processes, organisations and technologies led him to embrace a data driven approach. Like most engineering leaders, he struggled to find an efficient and objective means to collect the data he was after. His initial efforts led to a web of Jira exports, spreadsheets, graphs and manual intervention. He joined Plandek in August of 2021 to help deliver the tools that he wanted for his own teams.
Luke has over 10 years’ experience delivering software products in a host of industries. He’s worked in every aspect of software development from product inception all the way through to delivery and support.
Luke started out as the Head of Customer Support at Globrix before moving quickly into Project management as the business expanded. He then became Head of Product at Artirix where he was responsible for the development of the platform alongside the delivery of key client projects.
Luke joined Plandek over a year ago, and works tirelessly with the team to ensure we build a product to improve the working lives of delivery leads.
Plandek delivers a new level of actionable insight in near real time. As a result, our clients often ask for consulting support to help implement the opportunities for improvement revealed by Plandek.
Our Customer Success team provide an excellent level of ongoing relationship management, and also offer additional professional services support agreed with the project sponsor. This typically involves 1-5 days per month of support.
If you require more extensive consulting support, we engage our trusted consulting partners.
Our trusted partners offer help in larger, scaled Agile deployments