I worked together with John at the technology division of Sky Television in Germany in the development of the set-top boxes. It was great working together with John for at least two reasons. First, his great way of dealing with technical problems finding solutions for new challenges but also digging deep into existing problems and finding the root causes and solutions on unknown territory.

Secondly, his personality, being an absolute team player, bringing the overall team that he is working with to new heights. Combining both of these abilities he ensures that the overall project went overly successful with good technical results and an immensely motivated team.

John has been a key part in the successfully and timely delivered application development project “Hyperdrive” at Sky Deutschland working together with Gillian Hughes, who took over as an external project lead on my behalf and has joined my team since then. John has taken over responsibility and leadership within the international development team, always looking forward, thinking ahead, being creative and fast in flexible and scalable solutions/implementations. He kept his enthusiasm when things were tough and proved his ability to easily adapt to new requirements and changes. John also demonstrated excellent communication and delegation skills.

John managed to get familiar with the German ways of living & working (at Sky) really fast, lived team spirit at its best, delivered highest quality work and simply is a great person. Thank you very much, John! I would love to have you back in the development team if a new project kicks off.

John & I worked together on a very high profile product relaunch with fixed timescales, a challenging budget, and consistently changing scope.
Entering any project which has already kicked off can be daunting for a PM, especially in a new country (Deutschland) so it was excellent to be introduced to John over a cuppa Yorkshire Tea, and to be given a comprehensive and completely understandable briefing on development completed to date.
John was a key member of the Application Development team, and together we ended up running with multiple concurrent projects.

He is a fastidious developer, a methodical problem solver, and delivers high quality work. He is excellent at providing updates to progress, explaining the details and providing ‘layman’ explanations where required. All qualities which make having him as part of your team, a dream!
John was instrumental in creating the very close team bond we experienced at Sky Deutschland working on the Hyperdrive project. As a final note, this project has been lauded in Sky Deutschland as an example of outstanding project & product delivery and the team was 1 of 4 shortlisted as outstanding international delivery team in the Sky Awards.
In addition he is great fun, can lighten the mood when it gets a bit much, and is a fantastic Social Secretary, I miss working with him already. Oh and I have run out of T-Bags.