With over 37 years professional experience in software product development, I have seen many methods come and go. It is exciting to see the industry has finally adopted LEAN principles into software development with the introduction of concepts like Agile and Scrum. More recently, the industry has found ways to make this more scalable and to work efficiently in large software organisations.

But adopting these new methods is often a tough journey. Many principles are not well understood and as a senior manager it is not so easy to embed all this in a running business/ organisation and to realise the tangible promises of Agile. I have seen Agile implementations fail just because the necessary changes in leadership did not happen. It is hard work, but it is absolutely worth all the effort; it really pays off.

As a manager of 500+ engineers, I learned a lot. I am proud of what we achieved and passionate to share these experiences with others and help other organisations to realise substantial improvements in productivity, predictability and flexibility.