Background

I’ve been working in the field of software and tech product development for more than forty years. Starting out with building my own hardware and learning to program on Queen Mary College’s ICL 1907E running George3 and Maximop, in Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Snobol, Algol68 and Assembler. In my first few jobs I worked with a wide range of micro- and mini computers; reviewed various hardware for monthly magazines; and built various commercial systems on DEC PDP11s and VAXes under RSTS/E, RSX, RT11 and VMS, using Pascal, BASIC+, DIBOL and Assembler.

Following several years as an employee, I stepped out on my own, building and launching the first commercial Modula-2 compiler on PDP11s and VAXes; teaching post-graduate courses on software development in real-time systems and consulting widely on software development practices.

Buying one of the first NeXT cubes when they first became available in the UK, i spent several years helping City and international financial companies, banks, integrators and multi-nationals adopt NeXTStep and Object Oriented development techniques.

After a brief spell in general management, I worked abroad in Europe and the USA, again helping organisations understand and apply advances in software development practices.

Returning to the UK, I ran several software development organisations within larger businesses, including Sun Microsystem’s UK Java Centre, before creating, as founder and CEO, Familiar Limited – Europe’s first 100% Agile software house and consultancy.

Since 2000 I have focussed on changing the world of knowledge work for the better, through the application of Agile principles, and more recently – as an Organisational Therapist – through the application of psychotherapeutic techniques to organisations-as-a-whole.

I keep my hand in these days with, from time to time, some Web development – most recently Clojure, Javascript and CouchDB, and some embedded systems development on Windows CE and Linux using e.g. C and Python.

I am the co-founder of the RIghtshifting movement, and the creator of the Marshall Model (Dreyfus for the organisation), as well as Prod•gnosis, Emotioneering and FlowChain.