Tag Archives: Work

2011: Another big year

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Some highlights (the work-related ones anyway):

  • Feb: Set up Positive Incline Limited
  • Feb: Kanban Leadership Workshop (aka Kanban Coaching Workshop) with David Anderson in London
  • Mar-Sep: Continued part-time dev management role in Budapest, Hungary (and a big thank you to my former colleagues at Encore International, now part of M&C Energy Group)
  • Mar-May: Kanban consultancy in Johannesburg, South Africa as a DJA&A associate
  • Jun: The Kanban Leadership Retreat in Reykjavic, Iceland (#klris)
  • Oct-Nov: The Lean/Kanban conferences in Antwerp and Munich and the LESS conference in Stockholm (#lkbe11, #lkce11 and #less2011 respectively)
  • Nov: Speaking to my local (Matlock) business networking group about Kanban. Not just for techies! (#MBCnetworking)
  • Dec: Joined DJA&A full-time (more on that next year)
  • Dec: Leading my first 2-day DJA&A Kanban class in London

Top posts of 2011:

Older posts still going strong:

Positive Incline Limited

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Not just a blog, from March 1st Positive Incline is a multi-client management consultancy :–)

My specialties:

  • IT/product development process design, organisation, operation and improvement
  • Kanban, Lean, Agile development
  • The design and implementation of business process and quality improvement initiatives

My biases will be familiar to regular readers:

  • Speed, flow
  • Transparency, visualisation
  • Observation, evidence, feedback loops
  • Continuous learning & relentless improvement
  • Customer focus (getting right behind the sources of demand)
  • Sound project/process economics

I come from a development background (I still love programming); a former development manager, product manager and leader of change initiatives.

My job is to help you understand your organisation’s systems more deeply (not just conceptually, but how they really behave in practice) and to help find both improvements and ways to keep them improving for the longer term.  Look elsewhere if you want an off-the-shelf solution laden with jargon or lots of acronyms!

Distracted

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Yes, things are a bit slow on the blog front at the moment. Excuses: we move to a Georgian cottage in the Derbyshire Dales on Wednesday, I start an exciting new job on August 3rd (more on that nearer the time), and we have a new miniature schnauzer puppy named Klaus!

I haven’t forgotten described_routes and path-to though. There’s a serious link header tidy-up underway that delivers an efficient discovery protocol. Details to follow…

All in all, I’ve had a very enjoyable and quite productive 3 month break from full-time work. As well as the Ruby and Python programming I’ve been hanging out (as @asplake) with the #kanban guys on Twitter – a great bunch of people – and enjoyed @dpjoyce’s SkillsMatter presentation on kanban at the BBC in person a few weeks ago. It has also been good to clear the house of clutter (how Lean is that!), though to be honest, most of the credit for that goes to my very hardworking wife Sharon, who has been wonderful throughout this period of great change. Credit too to my teenage boys for agreeing to take this leap into the unknown!

Moving on up

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Tough times in the City of London, and I am “no longer required in the office”. The ugly black cloud hanging over the financial services industry (and investment banking in particular) has a major silver lining for me though: it creates the exciting opportunity to move to the beautiful Derbyshire Dales, and closer to my wife’s family. More on that closer to the time.

Meanwhile, if your organisation needs an effective technical leader (development manager, programme manager, agile project manager) with a strong sense for architecture, perhaps you should consider me. I enjoy travel, but I will need work that is either reasonably local (Chesterfield, Derby, Sheffield, Nottingham, say) or can be done mainly from home (Matlock Bath).

Why hire me?

I’ve been doing the “protocols and formats” thing for several years, with influence or direct control over integration protocols at enterprise and consortium level for the past eight or so years.  Returning to real-time front office development three years ago, I embraced REST as a tool for architectural improvement, reusability, testability, scriptability and so on.  So hire me if you need a system architecture that values these things over specific technologies.

I’m also big on learning, and although I do spend a lot of time reading and experimenting around my chosen areas of interest (to which my blog I hope testifies), this is not just for myself.  I have coached individuals and organised and empowered teams large and small for continuous improvement, and have had considerable success at improvement projects around capacity, reliability, business process and development process.  Again, some of these projects have had enterprise-wide impact.  So hire me (even for a short time) and know that I will leave your teams in good shape.

For further details, LinkedIn has a career summary, CV on request to mjb@asplake.co.uk.