Ian James

Ian has a deep background in delivery management and agile coaching, with experience spanning a wide range of teams and sectors. He has supported organisations at every stage of their agile journey — from introducing new teams to agile principles in changing environments, to coaching high-performing teams looking to sharpen their delivery and collaboration even further.

He is passionate about helping people understand and apply unfamiliar or complex ideas — including agile methods, emotional intelligence, delivery practice, and truly customer-centric working. Ian brings clarity and approachability to his coaching and training, enabling teams to test, learn, and embed new ways of working with confidence.

A particular strength Ian brings is optimisation. He supports teams and individuals to incrementally improve how they work — and how they think about work — in a way that’s sustainable and tailored to their organisational context.

He is also a strong advocate for often-overlooked soft skills: presenting, public speaking, effective team communication, and facilitating challenging conversations. These are skills Ian not only coaches but actively helps teams build into their everyday practice.

Before joining Public Digital, Ian led delivery teams across local government, social housing, and retail. He played a key role in supporting critical service teams after the cyberattack at Hackney Council, helping them to recover and work effectively under pressure. He also established new teams at Hackney and Newham Councils to support housing vulnerable people outside of London for the first time.

At PD, Ian has worked, embedded, in the transformation team at Change Grow Live to introduce agile ways of working and establish a consistent delivery cadence. More recently, he has supported the Stroke Association to adopt agile structures, significantly accelerating the pace and clarity of delivery across their change programmes.