Coaching, Consultancy, Training and Troubleshooting

Damsel Fly and Light - copyright ©2010 Barry Evans

The advantages

It's just me.

That may not sound like the strongest argument ever but just think about it. You have decided on Agile or you are looking for a project solution that will not break the bank. You want someone to focus on your needs and to deliver a return on your investment as quickly as possible.

How often have you talked to ace consultants and account managers in the hiring phase only to find that they send trainees and juniors to do the work and that the engagement is suddenly difficult to control and quantify?

I am selling my expertise and help here and now. I am not trying to support a large consultancy company that sees you as a business opportunity to get more bums on seats at a daily rate. What we agree is what you get – no hidden extras – and you control the timeline.

  • I am Agile so I will deliver in small complete deliveries with no future dependencies.
  • I am Agile ao I am test driven in order to establish expected outcomes.
  • I am Agile so I will work in partnership and act on your feedback.

I have no agenda other than to deliver good service to you and enhance my reputation by enhancing your business. You stay in control of your destiny and in control of costs.

When you talk to me you are talking to the person doing the work. I am concerned with understanding your business domain and building a relationship that enables me to deliver what you want. If a change in direction is required there is no third party to consult or consider – your business is the total and sole focus. Your business is my highest priority for as long as I am helping you.

You and I discuss and decide the terms of reference and identify and quantify the outcomes. What we agree is what you will get.

I offer a range of services ranging from full on engagement to targeted troubleshooting. I will engage for a day, a week or months depending on what you want delivered.

I can address everything from company-wide Agile conversion to specific Agile problem areas from the purely technical to getting to grips with business drivers and stakeholders. I have worked for small, medium and large organisations and I understand the issues and opportunities each faces.

The sort of things I can help you with in the short, medium or long term:

Project management:

  • Project initialisation
  • Retrospective facilitation and training
  • Requirements capture facilitation and training
  • Building stakeholder trust
  • Translating customer needs to agreed requirements
  • Budgeting and finance
  • Establishing and maintaining plans

Technical coaching:

  • Agile design and architecture
  • Coding practices
  • Test first and Test Driven Development
  • Pair programming
  • Test team agility
  • Establishing continuous integration environments
  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • Customer acceptance testing

Meta engagements

  • Coaching the agile coaches
  • Establishing self sustaining cultures
  • Communications training
  • NLP in business training
  • Roadmaps and plans for implementing Agile
  • Effective Agile means getting things done and building effective teams.
  • Effective Lean means identifying waste and finding solutions
  • Effective communications means understanding what is being said

Business goals

  • Improved communications with colleagues, customers and partners.
  • Improved responsiveness and business agility in a volatile marketplace and fast evolving technologies.
  • Plans that map the current state and desired reality and how to make the journey.
  • Effective and timely decisions.
  • Improved cycle time from concept to market.
  • Priorities based on company values and leadership vision.
  • Sustainable solutions with minimum maintenance costs.
  • Improved quality of products and services.
  • Managment directing not firefighting.
  • Consistent and reliable return on investment.
  • Finding and maintaining the leading edge.
  • Sustainable productivity and full organisational engagement.
  • Risks understood, quantified and managed.

Project goals

  • Sustainable, repeatable and effective planning and prioritisation mechanisms.
  • Dependable requirements capture, estimating and costing.
  • Clear vision of project resources, project status and project objectives.
  • Customer engagement and collaboration leading to outstanding customer satisfaction.
  • Project cycles that improve and adapt with accurate feedback.
  • Skills and resources matched to project requirements.
  • Metrics that assist decision making.
  • Standards that are easy to communicate and implement.
  • Project scope matched to time and budget.

Technical goals

  • Realistic requirements.
  • To work on high quality products and services.
  • To work for a business that appreciates the value of technical skills.
  • To work for a company that allows time and space to produce easily maintainable products that can adapt to future requirements.
  • Change control that supports the creation of a dependable shared code base.
  • Access to leading edge technologies.
  • Continuous development of technical skills.
  • Technical input to planning and respect for professional technical advice.
  • Able to estimate with confidence that this will be treated as an estimate not a prediction.
  • Top class colleagues to collaborate with and to learn from.
  • Visibility of end result of work and connection to the customers and users of products and services.
  • Shared standards
  • Meaningful metrics
Contact me to discuss your requirements at: enquiries@trousersofreality.com

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