My story, my why

AllanAdmin from Allan Kelly Associates

I thought I’d open 2021 year with a personal story of how I got where I am today (no, I’m not in San Francisco, although that is the Golden Gate in the picture)

Allan Kelly on the north side of the Golden Gate bridge, 2001.

I started programming when I was 12 (ZX81 then BBC) and then led a very successful career into my 30s – including a spell in California. Increasingly I found the code was not the challenge, I could make the code do what I wanted. The problem was the way we were managed, or mismanaged, the things we were ask to do and the way we were organised.

So began my journey into “management”. Determined to be a better manager than those I had worked for I took myself back to school. During a year in business school I learned a lot of good stuff, I discovered “organisational learning” and I reconnected with my dyslexia.

“Agile” was just breaking at the time and in agile I saw the same ethos of learning I was getting so excited about. The reports of agile teams I read described the best aspects of the developments I had worked on. For me, managing software delivery and enhancing agile are the same thing.

My mission became to help my younger self: help technologists deliver successful products and enjoy satisfying work. Most of what I do falls under the “agile” banner but really it is about creating the processes and environments were people can learning, thrive and excel.

When people are getting satisfaction from their work delivering great products, businesses succeed and grow. And as software has come to underpin every digital initiative my work has expanded.


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