Russell Miles, TweetManaging Director of Open Credo
Biography: Russell Miles
"Never a dull moment" describes Russ pretty well. While working as a full-time Technologist for a defence contractor Russ also completed writing 2 books ("AspectJ Cookbook", "Learning UML 2.0" for O'Reilly Media) and obtained a BSc and then an MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford University. This multi-tasking tendency (or "gift/curse", depending on how you look at it) has enabled Russ to gain a huge amount of experience working in a diverse collection of industry sectors.
Finally specialising in the "cloud-scale" enterprise systems domain, long before "cloud" was even mentioned, Russ has continually worked on in high-availability, high traffic web and internal event-based systems.
Russ took the decision in 2009 to take on the reins at OpenCredo as Managing Director and consultant. To ensure that he has as little spare time as possible, Russ is also a keen contributor to open source projects and an active track host and speaker or "noise maker" on large scale, enterprise systems integration both locally in London and internationally. He's also found the time to co-author a third book for O'Reilly titled "Head First Software Development".
Russ' latest project is working on a leading edge tool for business to make the most out of the burgeoning flexible IT commodity markets that are enabled by Cloud and related technologies. He's also in the process of turning all this first-hand experience into, yep you guessed it, another book.
Presentation: Tweet"Why don't we learn!?"
Many agile rollouts start out with the very best of intentions. We get the values, we understand the principles, and some of the practices even start to make a bit of sense. But there's one technique that underpins it all and can very much be the difference between success and failure.
It's not something you can buy, it is hard earned but you start doing it from the first moment you draw breath. Organisations (and people) can be staggeringly good at it sometimes, and downright appalling at others. Worse, it can be the reason your competitor beats you to the punch, whether you're both agile or not.
The problem is we often don't realise and are unable to put a value on this killer skill, but if we did we'd be ready for an agile transformation, or any change, every time.
In this talk Russ Miles, CEO of OpenCredo, will talk about how to understand, put hard value on and then maximise that killer skill to give you the best chance of success as you go through your agile transformation. The killer skill is 'learning'.