About Me

I think that I’m supposed to write this in the third person even though it’s actually me that’s writing it. That seems to be the convention now. It must make it look like people are important, like they’ve got a PA or something…

I’m a Senior Consultant working for ThoughtWorks in Melbourne, Australia, which means I do all kinds of cool stuff but that’s jumping the gun a bit, it’s probably best if I start closer to the beginning rather than at the end. When I was younger I used to love playing with computers. I owned Commodores, Amiga’s, Sinclaire Spectrums and all that good stuff, so when I left school at 16 I did two things: (1) Got a job with a local IT company; (2) Went to college to study Computing, Maths and Economics. I wasn’t particularly good at the academic stuff at this stage but got through it ok. I did really like the working bit though. I got to work with a small local start-up that built bespoke PC’s for the general public and private businesses. This is in the mid nineties when the hardware business was booming. I started off by making cups of tea for the MD and working in the shop and over the course of almost 4 years I got to work in Sales, Customer Service, Production and Technical Support. The business had somewhere around 60 employees, was very profitable (one year we made The Times Top Ten Fastest Growing Companies list) and by the end of my time there I had seen all of the elements of the business and how they slotted together as a system, as well as becoming pretty handy with technology! That was really the end of what I look at as the first stage in my development as a computer geek.

Unfortunately my fun came to an end when the MD decided to wrap up the business and pursue other initiatives overseas. At this point I had left college and gone on to do a Computer Science degree at The University of Aston in Birmingham, England, which was going remarkably well. Unfortunately I no longer had the job I had planned on at the end of it! At this point I organised a placement year at British Airways based at Heathrow Airport in London, working with their Airport Systems team in the eBusiness division. This was an absolute blast! You know the self-service kiosks that you use to check yourself in at the airport? Well I worked on the team that designed and built the first set of those and installed them in 82 global airports. Totally new technology at the time. I worked as an Analyst Programmer and really got involved with the team and the kiosks. It was a great team and it’s great to be able to say “we did that!”. After that going back to university wasn’t quite the same so I just got my head down and got on with things coming out with 1:1 honours. Not bad. End stage two. Hold on, no, not end stage two. I also met my partner, Anna, at British Airways. That’s important to know for later. End stage two.

So, going nicely, got a degree and British Airways have even offered me a job to go back to in London with a heap of my friends. Fab. Then 9/11 hits and everything takes a bit of a knock. With the airline industry in all kinds of trouble overnight non of us have jobs to go back to and it’s back to the drawing board. Thankfully after some serious effort applying, interviewing and waiting I get some great offers back for graduate roles including the big three IT consultancies in the UK. I decided to take an offer I had for Ford Motor Company’s global graduate scheme as I’ve always been a bit of a petrolhead, it was a good scheme with a good package and it didn’t mean that I’d spend the next five years working as a tester on ERP systems in Bumbledorking. This worked out pretty well for me despite the hard financial times FoMoCo was going through. I got to do some interesting business analysis, project manage some really cool projects and learn some really good general management skills by doing, well general managementy stuff. I got some great projects, great teams and an opportunity to progress my career really quickly. Most importantly I was introduced to Lean Thinking as I had spent my entire career with FoMoCo (4 years) in the Manufacturing & Supply Chain Systems Division. Most of my thinking today around Lean and Agile is applying the skills, tools and processes I learned from the Lean Manufacturing environment to new contexts. This all came to an end when Anna was offered a job in Melbourne, Australia (she does something clever with numbers), and I moved out with her, choosing to make a career move at the same time. I left FoMoCo (and the U.K.) a signed up member of the Lean Mafia. End stage three. I wish I hadn’t started this stages business.

So, you’re in Australia, you’ve got no job and it’s the start of summer, what do you do? The correct answer is absolutely nothing! Unfortunately I didn’t think this through and I got a job as an independent contractor working for one of the government agencies. Now this probably wasn’t the smartest move I’ve ever made looking back in retrospect; interests around progressive methodologies and cutting edge technologies don’t really bring government agencies to mind but I wanted a short term contract that wasn’t going to kill me while I got a better view of the technology landscape in Melbourne. I stayed around for 9 months doing mostly strategy work and initiating new projects as part an IT Innovation Group. I met a lot of great people who were weighted down by a system conspiring against them so I took a look around and hunted out a group of people called ThoughtWorks. They had a reputation for being the absolute best in technology leadership and technical skills that appealed to me and they were also strongly behind Agile delivery methods. They also had a reputation for being very bright, which can’t be true as I got myself a job there.

So back to the present day. I’ve been a ThoughtWorker for a year and a half and I can say that I don’t think I’ve enjoyed another job quite as much; only my time at British Airways can run it close. I work as a Senior Consultant doing agile coaching, project management, business analysis, strategic consulting and a bit of account management. We’re a pretty diverse bunch with around 1000 consultants all over the world led by Roy, who I can only describe as a left-wing radical visionary. We have very few “managers” globally and we are very much run by consultants. I get to work with all kinds of organisations from large banks and other financial institutions, online product companies, start-ups and everything in between. I try to present on Agile and Lean as much as I can to industry and get involved in industry events where possible; it’s hard not to when you’re surrounded by a bunch of luminaries.

The purpose of this blog is to really start to share some of the knowledge that I’ve been building over my 12 or so years in technology and process engineering. The body of knowledge around Agile XP is getting a lot better; it’s come a long way since I started to get involved, however there’s still relatively little around the application of Lean principles to IT. It’s growing and there are a bunch of people doing some great things out there at the moment in isolation. Hopefully this blog will let me share some of my activity and experiences and contribute to that knowledge. And if nothing else it will let me have some geeky fun….