Welcome to Agile Memes

Hi, wel­come to the Agile Memes blog.

For some­what ridicu­lous rea­sons that I wont bore you with, I have been forced to take down my pre­vi­ous blog in its entirety.

So it’s back to the white­board, out with those post it notes (or not, but we’ll come on to that later) and a lit­tle ret­ro­spec­tive, a touch of review and a smat­ter­ing of refac­tor­ing of  my thoughts.

A lit­tle pot­ted his­tory might be use­ful to give you an idea of what I have been up to:-

I was co-founder and CTO of eShop­works, a bou­tique soft­ware house based in south west Lon­don for nine years, prior to that I have worked for var­i­ous Blue-chips.  In 2004  I suc­cess­fully ingrained Scrum and XP into eShop­works, start­ing with the .net ver­sion  WORKSsite­builder and later through­out the organ­i­sa­tion. By late 2007 the com­pany was not going in a direc­tion that I felt entirely happy with and so I felt it time to say my au rev­iors.  In early 2008 I exited to spend time on my own projects both com­mer­cially and per­son­ally.  I spent a cou­ple of months work­ing with Quin­tes­sen­tially on some strat­egy advice on their social net­work­ing site Qubers and help­ing two of their sub­sidiary com­pa­nies to imple­ment B2C e-commerce systems.

At that point I decided to take a break from IT and spent some amaz­ing time in Argentina and Brazil to learn to kite surf and to pick up some Span­ish (and a very lit­tle Por­tuguese!).  Upon my return I enrolled in a num­ber of activ­i­ties, the most notable were Simon Zutchi’s men­tor­ing pro­gram focused on the buy­ing of prop­erty for rental, also on a coach­ing and self devel­op­ment pro­gram that included my cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as a Mas­ter Prac­ti­tioner of Neuro Lin­guis­tic Pro­gram­ming and hyp­notic lan­guage techniques.

Over that last eight months I have been focus­ing my ener­gies on all things Agile again.  I have spent the last six months doing a project recov­ery as interim CTO and Agile coach to I’m With the Band, a very clever video based music tuition start-up with ambi­tions to teach the world to sing, strum, drum and pluck.  I hope that they will soon unveil to the world what I sin­cerely believe to be  an incred­i­bly inno­v­a­tive and use­ful  prod­uct (and yes that is a lit­tle dig Tom!)

I have also been catch­ing up on a great deal of read­ing, a lit­tle net­work­ing and get­ting some cer­ti­fi­ca­tions for all those things I took for granted with at eShopworks.

Now in mid 2009 I aim to con­tinue my jour­ney as a coach and men­tor (while build­ing my prop­erty empire in the back­ground).  I love work­ing with oth­ers to bring out our com­bined opti­mum poten­tial.  See­ing the pos­i­tive results is incred­i­bly reward­ing and I look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing this jour­ney, shar­ing knowl­edge and expe­ri­ences with indi­vid­u­als and teams around the globe.

Tagged as: agile, nlp