Direct Agility — Enterprise Transformation Partner

Purpose & direction

What drives the work

Vision

To help organisations create clarity, confidence, and sustainable delivery in an increasingly complex world.

Direct Agility exists to evolve how organisations think, lead, plan, and deliver — creating environments where people, strategy, governance, and execution work together rather than against each other.

Every organisation has more potential than it is currently realising. Helping unlock that is what this work is about.

Mission

To partner with leaders and organisations to simplify complexity, align strategy to delivery, and create measurable transformation outcomes.

In practice that means working across strategy, governance, leadership, and delivery at the same time. Not sequentially. Not in isolation. Together, because that is how organisations actually function.

No unnecessary complexity. No framework theatre. Just honest, practical transformation that works in the real world.

Goals

Clarity. Confidence. Sustainable delivery.

Create clarity

Cut through complexity. Align strategy with action. Make the path forward visible at every level.

Build confidence

Develop capability from the inside out. Leaders and teams who trust themselves to deliver.

Evolve ways of working

Design operating models and governance built for how organisations actually work — not how frameworks say they should.

Enable data-driven decisions

Give leaders an accurate picture of delivery health at any point, not just at the end of quarter when it is too late to act.

Clarity across complex organisations

Visibility, alignment, and confidence across strategy, delivery, governance, risk, and dependencies.

Delivery confidence & predictability

From reactive delivery to structured, measurable, outcome-focused execution.

Leadership & organisational behaviour

Healthier, more adaptive, collaborative, and accountable environments.

Sustainable ways of working

Operating models and governance that are scalable, realistic, and tailored to the organisation.

Data-driven transformation

Real-time visibility through meaningful metrics, delivery visualisation, and intelligent reporting.

What we do

Services built around
your organisation

We work across the full transformation system — strategy, governance, culture, tooling, delivery, and leadership. Every engagement is scoped to fit where you are and what you actually need.

01Enterprise Transformation

02Agile Transformation & Scaled Delivery

03Target Operating Model Design

04Portfolio Governance & Strategy Execution

05Programme Recovery & Turnaround

06Leadership Coaching & Development

07Culture & Behavioural Change

08Governance & Tooling Transformation

09EWoW Delivery

10Scaled Delivery Visualisation

End-to-end · All sectors

Enterprise Transformation

We design and deliver large-scale organisational change from the ground up — shaping operating models, governance structures, ways of working, and the leadership capability to sustain it. We work at board level and delivery level simultaneously, because that is the only way to close the gap between strategy and execution. We do not install frameworks and leave. We stay until the organisation can run without us.

SAFe · Scrum · Kanban · ICAgile

Agile Transformation & Scaled Delivery

We help organisations shift to adaptive, value-focused ways of working that scale across teams, programmes, and portfolios. Our approach blends SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean — but we are not dogmatic about any single framework. We are certified at the highest level (ICP-ENT, ICP-CAT, CAL co-creator) and we bring that expertise to bear on your specific context, not a generic playbook. Whether you are starting agile for the first time or scaling what you already have, we build it to last.

Organisational Design · Structure

Target Operating Model Design

Structure precedes process. Process precedes tooling. Most organisations get this backwards — they choose the tools before they have designed the organisation that needs to use them. We help leaders design the structures, roles, accountabilities, and ways of working their strategy actually requires. Built from honest diagnosis of where the organisation is now, not where a framework assumes it should be.

LPM · OKRs · Big Room Planning

Portfolio Governance & Strategy Execution

Lean Portfolio Management, Big Room Planning, and OKR design that connect board-level intent to team-level delivery. We close the gap between what leadership decides and what teams actually do — giving leadership real-time visibility of delivery health, risk, and investment alignment. Built around your planning tool of choice: Primavera P6, MS Project, Smartsheet, or whatever you already use.

Complex · At-risk · Regulated

Programme Recovery & Turnaround

When a programme is in trouble the stated problem is rarely the real problem. We diagnose what is actually happening — the governance gaps, the decision-making failures, the data nobody trusts — and build a credible, honest path forward. We have recovered programmes across defence, NHS, financial services, and enterprise that others had written off. The work is demanding. We do not shy away from it.

Executive · Senior Leadership · CMI

Leadership Coaching & Development

One-to-one coaching for senior leaders navigating transformation, complex change, and high-pressure delivery environments. Not a programme. Not a framework. A skilled, honest thinking partner who has sat in complex delivery environments and understands the real pressures of leadership — at board level, programme level, and everywhere in between. We also design and deliver bespoke leadership development programmes for teams and functions.

Behavioural Change · Culture · People

Culture & Behavioural Change

Culture does not change because a leadership team decides it should. It changes when the behaviours that get people promoted, recognised, and protected start to change. We work with organisations to understand the real cultural drivers — the unwritten rules, the hidden incentives, the patterns nobody talks about — and design change that works with human behaviour rather than against it. This is some of the most difficult work in transformation. It is also the most important.

Jira · Confluence · Azure DevOps · P6

Governance & Tooling Transformation

Most organisations have the tools. What they are missing is a coherent governance model that makes those tools work together — and a team that understands both the technology and the delivery context well enough to connect them. We design and implement delivery ecosystems using Jira, BigPicture, Advanced Roadmaps, Confluence, Azure DevOps, and programme planning tools. We build the architecture, configure the workflows, and train the teams — so the tooling reflects how the organisation actually needs to work.

Proprietary Methodology · Tailored

EWoW Delivery

EWoW — Evolved Ways of Working — is our proprietary transformation methodology. Unlike off-the-shelf frameworks, EWoW starts with a structured 30-60-90 discovery: an organisation-wide survey and face-to-face interviews at every level, followed by quick wins and a bespoke strategy built from the evidence. It blends Agile, Lean, and traditional governance in the proportions your organisation actually needs — and because it is tailored every time, it looks different every time. The result is transformation your own people own and sustain long after we have left.

Jira · BigPicture · Confluence · Atlassian

Scaled Delivery Visualisation

Most organisations are delivering. Very few can see it clearly. We design and build scaled Atlassian delivery ecosystems — Jira, Confluence, and BigPicture — architected from milestones and critical path down through initiatives, epics, stories, tasks, and sub-tasks. Every level of the hierarchy is connected, every dependency mapped, every risk visible. The result is real-time delivery visualisation across multiple teams, functions, and programmes simultaneously — so leadership knows whether they are winning or losing before it is too late to react. Roadmaps at programme, function, and portfolio level. Dashboards that reflect value slicing, not just activity. Big Room Planning and quarterly planning fully supported. OKR delivery attached to project codes so strategy and execution are finally in the same place. If the tool is used correctly, it does not just track delivery — it changes how people think about it.

See how it works →

Client work

Selected engagements

All engagements are anonymised to protect client confidentiality.

Defence · Multi-programme · Land, Air & Sea

Delivering 24 months of programme scope in 18 across three simultaneous defence programmes

Three complex defence programmes required greater cross-programme alignment, integrated delivery visibility, and improved coordination across multiple nations and functions. Leadership needed clearer portfolio-level insight into dependencies, priorities, and contractual milestone alignment.

Introduced multi-level portfolio governance, implemented Big Room Planning to align leadership and engineering, and deployed real-time delivery visualisation giving leadership accurate programme data for the first time.

24→18

Months of scope

£3M

Cost savings

25%

Faster delivery

Enterprise Software · 40+ Teams · Multi-site

Unifying delivery across 40 teams without losing autonomy

A major enterprise software organisation sought to move from siloed annual planning to a unified, responsive delivery model. Teams operated independently with no shared cadence and leadership had no reliable cross-team visibility.

Designed and implemented a scalable delivery operating model. Shifted from annual to quarterly planning cycles and introduced OKRs aligned to strategic outcomes.

40+

Teams aligned

4→1

Planning cycles/year

30%

Predictability gain

Our methodology

EWoW is a transformation methodology developed by Sabrina C E Noto across twenty years of senior delivery work. It does not prescribe how organisations should operate. It starts with how they actually operate, and builds forward from there.

EWoW draws on traditional governance, Lean, and Agile in whatever combination the organisation needs. It works at team level and enterprise level. Because it is tailored to the organisation every time, no two implementations look the same.

Explore the full EWoW model →

Phase one

Listen and understand

An organisation-wide survey combined with face-to-face conversations at every level. The data tells us what is happening. The conversations tell us why. What comes out of it is an honest current-state picture that no internal report can produce on its own.

Phase two

Act on quick wins

Improvements that do not need a full strategy to act on. Quick wins release capacity and build credibility. Both are essential before the harder work begins.

Phase three

Build the strategy

The transformation strategy is built from the evidence. It is specific to this organisation, not copied from a playbook. It takes from every methodology available whatever actually fits, and the result is something the organisation's own people can own and keep going.

Evolved Ways of Working — EWoW

A complete transformation system — from strategic vision to daily team delivery. Click any tab to explore.

The EWoW delivery hierarchy connects strategic intent to team-level execution. Each level feeds the next — top-down direction, bottom-up visibility. Click any box for detail.

Strategic

Vision

The north star. Shared direction that gives meaning to every team's work.

Strategic goals & OKRs

Measurable outcomes linked directly to customer and contractual milestones.

Portfolio

Big Room Planning

Quarterly 1.5–2 day event. All teams. Commitment, visibility, risks.

Initiatives

Direction and milestones set by senior leads. Prioritisation of key activities.

Value stream mapping

Aligns structure around value delivery, not silos.

Programme

Epics

Breakdown of Initiatives. Owned by engineering leads. Key BRP output.

LPM & programme syncs

Bi-weekly cross-functional visibility on delivery, risk, dependencies.

Team

Stories & tasks

Daily delivery. Real-time Jira tracking. 15-min team syncs.

Team syncs

Psychological safety, accountability, collaboration. Agile or traditional.

Top-down → Vision → Initiatives → Epics → Stories ← Bottom-up visibility

Four pillars define the operating structure. Each has its own delivery and communication method. All four must work together — no pillar succeeds in isolation.

Leadership

Vision, strategic goals, board-level alignment

Programme planning

LPM, BRP, portfolio governance

Engineering delivery

Epics, engineering leads, work packages

Team delivery

Stories, tasks, daily syncs, Jira

Select a pillar above to see its responsibilities.

The EWoW coach works across all four pillars

Each pillar lead is the domain expert. The EWoW coach provides the connective tissue — ensuring methods, tools, and rhythms work across all four simultaneously.

The EWoW communication rhythm provides structured visibility at every level — from board to team. Each sync has a distinct purpose and audience.

Quarterly

Big Room Planning

1.5–2 day event. All teams + leadership + engineering. Sets Initiatives and Epics. Gathers blockers, risks, opportunities.

InitiativesEpics committedCross-team deps

Bi-weekly

Leadership LPM sync

Reviews delivery progress. Addresses issues and risks. Real-time visualisation fed bottom-up from team boards.

Delivery healthRisk escalationDecisions

Weekly

Engineering sync

Engineering and function leads. Progress in Jira. Blockers feed upward. Cross-function collaboration.

ProgressBlockersCross-function

Daily / 3x week

Team sync

15 minutes maximum. Progress, blockers, collaboration. Psychological safety and team accountability.

ProgressBlockersAccountability

Continuous

Real-time visualisation

Data flows bottom-up through team → engineering → leadership boards. One view of whole-programme health at any time.

Bottom-up dataLive view

The principle

"Data top-down, bottom-up in the day-to-day real-time. Traditional governance and evolved delivery — working together, not against each other."

EWoW uses two complementary tools — each with a distinct purpose. They are not integrated via API. They run in parallel, informing each other through structured process.

Programme Planning Tools

Your tools, working harder

Whether your organisation uses Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, or another planning tool, EWoW configures around what you already have. We don't replace your tooling. We make it work harder.

→Master schedule & critical path

→Business & customer milestones

→Estimated cost & FTE resource

→Schedule risk analysis & baseline

Managed by planning & project controls. Works alongside your existing programme governance — not against it.

Jira

Real-time delivery

Holds the issues teams need to perform over the quarter to achieve Initiatives and OKRs. Day-to-day delivery visualisation, task flow, and progress tracking.

→Real-time Epics & Stories tracking

→BigPicture for programme-level view

→Advanced Roadmaps for planning

→LPM Kanban board for leadership

Data flows bottom-up: team boards → engineering board → leadership LPM board.

Why we don't automatically integrate planning tools with Jira

Your programme planning tool and Jira serve different purposes at different cadences. Automating the link between them creates data conflicts and undermines both systems. The two run in parallel, informing each other through structured process — Big Room Planning, programme syncs, and regular schedule updates — not automation.

EWoW maps to the 6 Enablers of Business Agility — ensuring transformation covers the full organisational system, not just delivery processes.

Organisational culture

OKRs promote transparency and outcomes over outputs

Psychological safety built through team sync structure

Continuous improvement through retrospectives

Leadership & management

Leadership sync ensures alignment and intentional steering

Vision and goals set and communicated by leaders

Adaptive decisions enabled by real-time data

Organisational structure

Work package syncs coordinate across delivery structures

Value stream mapping aligns structure to value, not silos

Four-pillar model provides clear ownership at every level

People & engagement

Team syncs empower teams and foster psychological safety

Big Room Planning drives engagement and shared ownership

Agile, Kanban, or traditional, adapted to context

Governance & funding

OKRs tie funding decisions to outcomes, not projects

BRP aligns prioritisation and funding with value streams

Work package sync governs deliverables across horizons

Ways of working

Agile, Kanban, traditional: core to team-level delivery

Sync cadence supports continuous learning loops

Value stream mapping drives leaner ways of working

Scaled Delivery Visualisation

Know if you're winning.
Before it's too late to act.

Most programmes have data. What they lack is visibility. We architect Atlassian delivery ecosystems that give leadership and teams a single, honest, real-time picture of where every programme stands — from portfolio strategy down to individual tasks.

Full Hierarchy

From milestone to sub-task

Milestones · Critical path · Initiatives · Epics · Stories · Tasks · Sub-tasks. Every level configured to the depth your programme actually needs — no more, no less.

Multi-level Roadmaps

Programme, function & portfolio

Separate roadmap views for every audience — teams, functions, programme leadership, and board — each showing the right level of detail for the decisions being made.

Real-time Dashboards

Value slicing, not just activity

Dashboards built around value delivery, not ticket counts. See what is flowing, what is blocked, and where risk is accumulating — before it becomes a crisis.

Dependencies & Risk

Mapped, visible, managed

Cross-team dependencies and programme risks surfaced in BigPicture and Confluence — not buried in a spreadsheet nobody reads. Configured to trigger the right conversations at the right time.

Planning Integration

BRP & quarterly planning, built in

The architecture supports Big Room Planning and quarterly planning cycles natively — so the plan you build in the room is the same plan the teams execute, with no translation layer in between.

OKR & Financial Alignment

Project codes attached to outcomes

Project codes and OKR delivery attached directly to work items — so reporting flows upward automatically and every piece of delivery is traceable to a strategic objective and a budget line.

Built on the Atlassian suite — Jira, Confluence, and BigPicture — and architected by someone who has delivered this at scale in complex, regulated environments.

The team

The people behind the work

Sabrina C E Noto

Founder & Lead Consultant

Twenty years delivering transformation at board and delivery level across defence, NHS, financial services and enterprise. Creator of EWoW. Co-creator of Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership UK. Available for Head of Transformation, Director of Transformation, and senior consulting engagements.

Full profile →

Belinda Price

Enterprise Agile Coach & Consultant

Proven track record driving large-scale transformation across defence, finance, technology, and energy. Specialist in scaling agile, Lean Portfolio Management, and digital transformation — working hands-on with leadership and teams to turn strategy into action.

Izzabella & Annabella

Chief Barketing Officers

Two miniature dachshunds with strong opinions about everything and absolutely no interest in governance frameworks. Essential to morale. Non-negotiable members of the Direct Agility operation.

Meet Izzabella → Meet Annabella →

Helen Williams

Leadership Enterprise Coach & Trainer

Helen has been leading organisations through change and digital transformation for over 20 years — working across complex large-scale organisations, scale-ups and start-ups to help them build structures, cultures and practices that achieve success. She specialises in outcome-led transformation strategies, bespoke operating models, and immersive training experiences. Helen is a co-developer of the Domain-Driven Organisational approach to building adaptive organisations.

theadaptiveorganisation.com →

Jeremy Sutherland

Enterprise Agility, Transformation & Training

A key part of the agile movement from its inception, Jeremy brings over three decades of experience across FTSE 100 organisations, public sector, financial services, start-ups and scale-ups. He specialises in shaping transformation strategies around a Domain-Driven approach to organisational design — and is co-founder of the Domain-Driven Organisational approach, helping organisations become more adaptive and resilient.

What clients say

Recommendations

Sabrina has been an amazing leader in agile transformation, always prioritising customer needs and team inclusivity. Her flexibility and willingness to adapt have driven exceptional outcomes, building a collaborative environment where everyone's skills shine.

Rachel Penfold

Agile Practitioner — Defence sector

If you're looking for an empathetic coach who truly understands technology and delivery at scale, Sabrina is your go-to. She excels in coaching everyone from executives to team members, making her the ideal partner for any serious transformation.

Keith Williams

Director — Enterprise Software

With her encyclopedic knowledge and real-world experience, Sabrina stands out as the most capable transformation leader I have worked with. Her collaborative, patient, and practical approach helps teams achieve results even in the most challenging environments.

Colin Lacey

Head of Product Management — Enterprise Software

Sabrina is like a photon — dynamic, impactful, and able to connect at every level. Her leadership, technical understanding, and human touch made her indispensable. An inspiring force who genuinely appreciates the people around her.

Mahesh Krishnamoorthy

Senior Leader — Retail sector

Clarity Through
Complexity.

Transformation that starts where you actually are

What drives the work

Services built around
your organisation

Enterprise Transformation

Agile Transformation & Scaled Delivery

Target Operating Model Design

Portfolio Governance & Strategy Execution

Programme Recovery & Turnaround

Leadership Coaching & Development

Culture & Behavioural Change

Governance & Tooling Transformation

EWoW Delivery

Scaled Delivery Visualisation

The EWoW 30-60-90

Selected engagements

Delivering 24 months of programme scope in 18 across three simultaneous defence programmes

Unifying delivery across 40 teams without losing autonomy

Know if you're winning.
Before it's too late to act.

From milestone to sub-task

Programme, function & portfolio

Value slicing, not just activity

Mapped, visible, managed

BRP & quarterly planning, built in

Project codes attached to outcomes

The people behind the work

Recommendations

Latest thinking

Let's talk about your programme

Clarity ThroughComplexity.

Transformation that starts where you actually are

What drives the work

Services built aroundyour organisation

Enterprise Transformation

Agile Transformation & Scaled Delivery

Target Operating Model Design

Portfolio Governance & Strategy Execution

Programme Recovery & Turnaround

Leadership Coaching & Development

Culture & Behavioural Change

Governance & Tooling Transformation

EWoW Delivery

Scaled Delivery Visualisation

The EWoW 30-60-90

Selected engagements

Delivering 24 months of programme scope in 18 across three simultaneous defence programmes

Unifying delivery across 40 teams without losing autonomy

Know if you're winning.Before it's too late to act.

From milestone to sub-task

Programme, function & portfolio

Value slicing, not just activity

Mapped, visible, managed

BRP & quarterly planning, built in

Project codes attached to outcomes

The people behind the work

Recommendations

Latest thinking

Let's talk about your programme

Clarity Through
Complexity.

Services built around
your organisation

Know if you're winning.
Before it's too late to act.