Skip to main content

NorDev 7: Agile as Enterprise Culture (Aviva) & Preaching The Gospel (Neontribe)

Image
By
What: NorDev 7: Agile as Enterprise Culture (Aviva) & Preaching The Gospel (Neontribe)

Where: Virgin Wines, 4th Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1TN

When: Wednesday 9th January 2014 @ 6.30pm

Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/152603352/

Stories from Suncorp: Agile as Enterprise Culture 

Rob Hills (Aviva)

As part of Aviva’s ambition to adopt Agile the group COO created an exchange programme with the Suncorp Group in Australia and New Zealand. A team of 4 Aviva people travelled over to see the Suncorp IT and Business operations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from July to October this year. What we saw was an organisation that has been on a long, challenging and rewarding journey to embrace Agile at Enterprise scale within the Insurance and Banking sector. This talk will share the background to the exchange programme and the companies involved, share what we experienced including a video we created for Aviva and talk about how Aviva is furthering its Agile ambitions and learning from the exchange programme.

The presentation will also discuss one of the major programmes underway at Suncorp covering how the team approached the technology and cultural challenges of running Agile at scale in a complex organisation and highly regulated sector.

Rob Hills is a 12 year Aviva veteran with a background including most roles in IT. A fan and practitioner of Agile, Systems Thinking and Lean I’m constantly discovering how much I don’t know and the Suncorp experience helped reinforce this! On returning from Suncorp I’ve been asked to work with the major change programmes within Aviva looking at how we can further develop our Agile adoption.


Preaching the gospel of the Government Digital Service Design Manual 

Harry Harrold (Neontribe)

Over the last two years there's been a step-change in how central government has approached web projects. I'll give an outsider's view of the story; how it started, and where it might go next.

People have been telling government it's been doing things wrong for years: folk like MySociety and Rewired State from the technical side, and any number of new stories of big projects gone badly wrong. In 2010, a report by Martha Lane Fox called for a revolution. Fix transactions, fix publishing, build a government digital service, get open. Government listened. Alpha, beta, live followed: publishing first, transactions next. Award-winning, user-centered, iterative, aimed at getting people digital by default.

Importantly for us, they wrote down how they did it; and how they want the rest of government to do it. The Government Service Design Manual isn't perfect by any stretch, but it's the best articulation I've seen of how I think things should be done, and I'll step through it. I think it has huge ramifications for the spread of agile development practices elsewhere.

Harry (Harrold) remembers the last dot-com boom, and left the US technology company who bought his start-up out when they asked him to move to Texas. After a long break, he started really learning again in 2007. He believes empathy is a key skill for developers and designers, or as he says "If you care about the people who'll use the software you're creating, it'll be better software."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more