Oliver Bernard

We are looking for Future CodeHers volunteers in 2026 - please check out https://lnkd.in/ePuZgNYp

🏆 Winners 🏆 We are absolutely thrilled and incredibly proud that our Future CodeHers programme WON 'Best Initiative of the Year' award at the Women in Tech Employer Awards 2025 last night. This recognition is a huge testament to our commitment to promoting gender diversity in the tech industry by inspiring girls in school about careers in tech. To add more excitement to the evening, we are also honoured to receive a High Commendation for Best Recruitment Agency. A huge thank you to the judges, organisers and our fantastic team at OB 👏 👏

Rightshoring is a term I used to hear a lot, earlier in my career, but not so much anymore. But I think it's probable the best approach when considering building tech teams outside of your core location. There’s a lot of noise right now about where to build engineering teams. Onshore. Nearshore. Offshore. Hybrid. Remote-first. Rightshoring simply means: Build the right team, in the right place, for the right work. ❌ Not “cheapest”. ❌ Not “all local”. ❌ Not “fully remote by default”. Just the best mix to deliver outcomes fast, securely, and with the right talent. What rightshoring considers: ✅ Talent quality & capability ✅ Time-zone overlap & collaboration ✅ Delivery velocity ✅ Domain complexity ✅ Cost efficiency ✅ Regulatory & security needs ✅ Stakeholder proximity Rightshoring recognises a truth we see every day: You don’t need every engineer in the same room. You just need the right engineers, aligned to the same outcome. The model we run at OB Collective, which typically works well for our clients is: 🇬🇧 UK leadership + Architecture 🇪🇺 Nearshore feature squads & Engineering 🧠 Shared playbook, culture & delivery DNA Why it works: ✅ Circa 50% more cost-efficient than UK-only build-outs ✅ Teams in-seat fast, not 6-9 months later, compared to perm team builds ✅ High-trust Senior Engineers (not anonymous offshore resourcing) ✅ No long-term headcount burden ✅ Stakeholder confidence provided by senior UK resource For product teams, the question isn’t, where should my team sit? The right question is, how do I maximise delivery speed, quality, and value? That’s rightshoring. If you’re exploring ways to scale delivery without scaling headcount, or if you're curious how nearshore squads plug into UK leadership effectively, happy to share what’s working in the real world. #Rightshoring #Nearshore #Offshore, #Engineering #SDLC #Digital #Tech

Nearshore or Onshore? The conversation has changed. For years, the reflex answer to “How do we build a feature team?” was straightforward, hire permanent Engineers or scale with UK contractors. Today, that model isn’t always the smartest route, especially when you need to deliver a product or ship meaningful features in under 12 months with much higher cost pressure and tighter budgets than the golden years of the early 2020's! At OB Collective, we’ve seen a clear shift, Nearshore feature teams are performing on par with traditional UK resourcing models in both speed and efficiency, without compromising quality or culture, with the added benefit of a huge cost reduction. Here’s why: ✅ Cost efficiency: You can build a high-performing nearshore squad for around 50% less than a UK onshore/perm equivalent. That’s not rate shopping, it’s structural efficiency. ✅ Outcome-driven delivery: You get a full, ready-formed teams, Engineering, QA, DevOps, leadership, aligned to outcomes, not time. ✅ Time to value: Our teams integrate fast, deliver fast, and can ship meaningful product increments. You pay for delivery, not a long organisational hiring ramp. ✅ Reduced long-term overhead: If your goal is to get a product built, proven, and running, why absorb permanent headcount, recruitment cycles, and operational drag? ✅ Cultural alignment: Our Associate network has been built over 15+ years. Shared standards, shared delivery DNA, and timezone aligned collaboration mean it feels like one team, not an offshore bolt-on. This isn’t about replacing UK talent, it’s about using the right model for the right mission. Permanent teams make perfect sense for long-term capability. But when you need to build and ship, quickly and predictably? A nearshore feature team is often the smarter, cleaner, more economical move. If you're thinking about building a product or accelerating a roadmap this year, we’d love to share what we’ve learned and how our model works in practice. Build fast. Build smart. Build with the right team for the mission. #Nearshore #Engineering #SOW #Outcomebased #Product

SCAM ALERT - Unfortunately, we've received a number of emails today with regards to text messages that have been sent out in our company name, but aren't actually from Oliver Bernard or anyone associated with the company. A number of people, although none that are on our database or registered to work with us, are being contacted by text message with our name attached - it is fraudulent activity and a scam which we are speaking with ActionFraud to investigate further. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused and are doing our best to resolve. Most phone providers are part of a scheme that allows customers to report suspicious text messages for free by forwarding it to 7726. If you forward a text to 7726, your provider can investigate the origin of the text and arrange to block or ban the sender. Thank you.

Why HTTPS Alone is No Longer Enough – Cyber Security 🔐 Most people think if a system has HTTPS, it’s secure. But HTTPS just protects the pipe, not the data. Once the data arrives inside your network, it’s decrypted. And that’s where attackers wait. They spoof identities. Tamper with payloads. Slip into the gaps between systems. Man-in-the-middle attacks, insider threats, misconfigured APIs and social engineering tactics are all now more common than zero-days. It’s not just about stopping access at the door anymore. It’s about verifying every transaction, at every point of movement. We’ve seen what happens when that breaks down. The Electoral Commission breach. Co-Op. M&S. JLR. Each attack led to reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny and huge remediation costs. When you hold sensitive data such as health, legal, financial or national, trust isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s everything. Government Departments can’t keep relying on perimeter security and good intentions. They need verifiable, tamper-evident infrastructure. Infrastructure that aligns with Zero Trust, where no action is trusted by default and every claim is proven. Modern threats require modern solutions. Because true cyber resilience means preparing for when, not if. If you're currently working in Cyber or Information Security, this is one of the topics we’ll be exploring in our upcoming online session on November 6th — let me know if you’d like to join. #Government #CyberSecurity #ZeroTrust

Are you leading an Engineering team and wondering if you are above or below the curve when it comes to AI tooling Adoption in your SDLC? When ChatGPT was released into the world at the back end of 2022, we were all told our jobs would be swallowed up by now and we'd either have a life of utopian leisure or dystopian inequality.... thankfully, we aren't quite there yet! However, we are at an age that, if the correct AI tooling is implemented, adopted and measured, it can be a huge help in the SDLC. But it's hard to know how you are doing against your peers, where you could improve and how to measure ROI. That's why OB Collective have launched our AI Adoption Assessment, it's a short, sharp engagement that will ✅ Assess & Benchmark your team's usage and adoption against our industry survey ✅ Provide a detailed report ✅ Assist you in implementing and accelerating AI tooling that's right for you ✅ Measure your ROI Sound interesting? DM me to find out more #AI #AItooling #Adoption #Techconsulting #SDLC #SoftwareEngineering

Where does AI add the most value, within the SDLC? When talking to tech businesses of various sizes, it's clear everyone is at very different stages in their AI adoption. (not a hard and fast rule, but as the engineering teams seem to get bigger, the adoption rate appears to drop from what I have seen) We looked at AI’s impact on engineering productivity and the challenges of measuring ROI, in a recent survey we undertook, which was across 45 Engineering teams. Zooming in, it’s clear that adoption across the software development lifecycle is uneven. Some areas are seeing adoption faster, the obvious ones are. 🤖 Code generation & pair programming – helping engineers move faster and explore alternative solutions 🤖 Testing & QA – automating repetitive checks and surfacing potential defects earlier 🤖 Documentation – creating clearer onboarding materials and reducing knowledge silos Other stages are proving more complex to adopt. 🤖 Requirements & design – AI can suggest ideas, but real business context still relies on people 🤖 Deployment & monitoring – high stakes around reliability and security make teams cautious 🤖 Governance & compliance – ensuring AI use is safe, explainable, and within policy The big picture, AI isn’t a “plug-and-play” solution. Success depends on embedding it where it supports engineers rather than disrupts workflows. Adoption is strongest when organisations take a measured, experiment-driven approach, piloting in one area, proving value, and scaling. OB Collective are helping companies assess their AI Adoption by benchmarking you with the industry, providing a comprehensive report on where you are and how you can improve, then taking a few of those high-impact actions and helping you implement them into your workflows and measure ROI. If you are running an Engineering team and would like to hear more about how we can help in this space, then please reach out! #AI #SoftwareDevelopment #SDLC #EngineeringProductivity #TechLeadership

Great night at The Recruiter Awards last night! Being nominated for Most Effective Back Office Operation is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and passion of our Back Office team. While we didn't bring home the award, being a finalist among so many brilliant companies is a huge win for us.