Hi I’m Tom Reynolds and welcome to my site.
I’m a software development project manager, scrum master and an agile advocate using scrum to work with teams to create a trustful environment to help them build the correct software solution the right way.
Feel free to contact me if you have similar views or want to share your experiences.
I’ve started this site to share some of my views on agile software development and scrum in particular and will occasionally post new material and also update my blog, maybe you will find my ramblings interesting.
I’ve been in the software development industry for 20 years starting out as a programmer before moving onto senior developer and team leader. I’ve also in my time done business analysis, systems analysis and facilitated requirements gathering workshops. I eventually moved into project management and successfully managed software development projects through the full software development life cycle. This covered inception, analysis, development, test and implementation and covered diverse business areas such as warehouse management, sales order processing, stock control, retail point of sale and optical retail. I also managed the full budget for these projects.
During 2007 I started to get more and more interested in new ways of working and began to explore agile principles and practices in detail, initially looking at the UP framework and feature driven development. I was then drawn to scrum and on a new project I was involved in started to plan using the scrum techniques before finally adopting scrum fully onto the project in August 2007. I have been implementing scrum since and would not go back having enjoyed much success using this framework as well as working along with my team in a much more enjoyable and inclusive environment. Currently as well as continuing to implement scrum on my existing project I am actively involved in coaching my organisation in a transition to more agile practices with scrum as the backbone.
I believe however that to be truly agile it is far more than just adopting a particular framework or process. You need to open your mind and free your spirit, you have to wholeheartedly embrace change and be prepared to work with it and inspect and adapt everything you do and be prepared to try and fail to get to your goal. You must open your mind and embrace your team and trust them completely to get the job done and create an environment of inclusivity that fosters trust, courage and transparency whilst maintaining a sustainable pace for your team to work to. You must fully adopt an agile mindset and only by doing this can you hope to become truly agile.
