Meet Greg Horsfall, Lead Consultant at Nimble [2024 update]

What’s your role at Nimble?

I am a Lead Consultant within the Delivery Capability at Nimble. I originally joined Nimble as a Senior Business Analyst in 2022, but my passion has always been in enabling and pushing teams to achieve more, and perform better.

In delivery, there’s no such thing as an average day, sure there are regular meetings, but every single one can bring up a new opportunity and challenge to jump on. So whether I’m working with an individual team, multiple teams, or a whole programme/portfolio, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to add value, or protecting the teams I’m working with from obstacles that are going to prevent them from being their best selves.

I can introduce teams to textbook Agile ways of working, and to guide them through the motions. But the real value, and what really excites me about what I do, is in working for the teams, helping them to meet their goals in a way that works for them, and sets them up for long term success. If I can leave a client team, and they’re as excited as I am about constantly improving how they work to add the most value, I consider my job a success.

Tell us about your journey to Nimble

Over the years I have been part of some really exciting projects, but I have been informed by my wife that maybe they’re not quite as exciting to everyone else, so I’ll try to summarise my career history and how I came to be at Nimble Approach (again).

IT Projects, both waterfall and Agile across a variety of industries as a consultant with IBM and Mason Advisory. Onto the wonderful yet challenging world of self employed contracting, and this is where I first encountered Nimble Approach. I had three successful placements with Nimble.

But when Covid hit, all external contractors departed, and I took this opportunity to try something entirely different and I moved to the Netherlands where I worked in the Mobile Games industry (en ik heb een beetje Nederlands geleerd). But with the birth of my daughter, it was time to return to the UK, and having followed Nimble’s continued journey I was keen to get involved again.

I’m glad I did. Whilst I returned to Nimble as a Senior Business Analyst, I was given the space, support and opportunity to move out of Business Analysis, and into Agile Delivery, with a promotion along the way.

having followed Nimble’s continued journey I was keen to get involved again.

Why did you make the move to Nimble?

I had worked with Nimble before as a contractor. The culture at the heart of Nimble has always been focused towards getting the most out of those working for and with Nimble in a constructive and engaging way. The work hard, play hard mantra was a real thing, not just something said to draw you in, and even though I was a contractor, I felt as much a part of Nimble as Chris Roberts (the founder and CEO).

After I went my own way and moved to the Netherlands, I continued to follow Nimble’s journey. And when I moved back to the UK, I was keen to get involved.

What are you aiming to achieve at Nimble?

For a lot of my career, I have forged my own path, trying different things until something worked out for me and those I was working with. In joining Nimble, my aim was to continue to grow and develop, but with the support of the other Nimblers. This has absolutely been the case in the support I’ve had to date, including the opportunity to attend international Agile conferences, valuable training and certification, and being able to pick the brains of people with far more experience than me.

Now that I’ve been here for a few years, my aim continues to be learning and growth so that I can enable and empower bigger teams, projects, products, and programmes. I don’t know what the limit is for where I can grow with Nimble, but I’m going to keep pushing until I find it.

What do you love about working in Tech?

Working in Tech, I love being a part of journey’s to achieve new things, whether it’s ground-breaking technology, or finding ways to improve how things are now. Whilst there can be similarities between different projects, they’re rarely the exact same (no two AWS migrations are exactly alike), and the new challenges that come with each project really make the work interesting (and dare I say it, exciting).

There’s also an element of surrounding myself with people who know far more than I do, about a technical topic. Learning from others, and sharing my (non-)technical knowledge helps products to become better than they were before.

What achievement are you most proud of?

I rarely like to be the centre of attention, I’m the guy who when it comes to my birthday, I take the day off and don’t say a thing about it, but I do have a few things that I’m happy to toot my own horn about.

I helped to deliver a mobile game that has over 5 million downloads. When I joined the project, there wasn’t much of a plan and there was a general lack of direction, but by the time we came to doing the Soft Launch, it looked amazing and we had a game to be proud of.

Outside of work, there are a few things I’m particularly proud of, top of the list has to be my young daughter who I absolutely adore. A very close second (if only second and not first because my wife might read this) has to be completing the Mongol Rally in 2011, where as part of a team we drove an old Skoda Fabia 10,000 miles from the UK to Mongolia. The last 300ish miles we had a leak in the radiator that we didn’t have the equipment to fix, and the last 5 miles we didn’t have any more water to put in, so we used Sprite. I’m surprised the radiator didn’t just blow up at that point, but we made it. I’m pretty proud of that.

What’s your biggest strength?

One thing that I consistently get in feedback from the people I’m working with, is my ability to work on so many things at once, that multitasking is my superpower. But really, I’m not multitasking, because what I’m actually great at (tooting my own horn) is being organised, and not really getting too “frazzled” by having a lot of things to do. This allows me to handle complex and complicated situations efficiently and effectively.

What do you enjoy outside of work?

I’m a big table top gaming fan, from board games to roleplaying games. Even when I’m washing the dishes, I’m usually thinking about creating game content, whether it’s homebrew D&D for the long running campaign that I run, or an idea for something that I can publish in my spare time (what little spare time I have these days).

What was your dream job when you were at School?

Archaeologist! At school I loved history, and I loved watching Time Team on TV. I remember getting a Time Team book for Christmas one year that talked about the process of excavations and come summer I ruined my mum’s flower beds trying to excavate a whole lot of nothing.

What’s your favourite piece of technology?

Currently it has to be my Steamdeck. I don’t get a whole lot of time to play games on my PC any more, but being able to just pick up my Steamdeck and play 15 minutes of Witcher 3 on the bus, that really scratches the itch.

Can you tell us something interesting about yourself?

It depends on what you find interesting! I speak a little Dutch (ik spreek een beetje Nederlands). I studied in Canada for a year. Before doing the Mongol Rally, I had only passed my driving test 2 months prior and hadn’t really done any driving between then and setting off. I have 6 tattoos. I have a double jointed thumb on my left hand, and for years that’s how I remembered left and right.