rob gibson — curriculum vitæ

Curriculum Vitæ

[email protected] +61.433.919.576 http://robgibson.me current as of November 2016

Page of 2 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ

The Pitch

Consultants are a nightmare.

They spout jargon while they try to convince you of their proprietary “methodology” and create more work.

And when you hit those innovation and strategy problems, culture or engagement issues, or impossible IT projects on fire — it seems there's no choice. The upside of a solution is huge. And your staff can't match the years of battle scars, expertise and perspective.

And yet the thought of a fleet of suits coming in armed with their narrowly focused tools and processes, multiplying as they complicate the hell out of everything … makes you want to whimper.

If there was a single resourceful professional who could handle the messiness of people issues, the intricacies of technology and the pragmatics of business, then you'd get that upside without the pain and expense of a typical consultancy.

You'd just have to find him.

you ha

ve


Rundown

Systems ArchitectureIT Strategy

Training / Coaching

Coding

Organisational Change

wicked problems

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

20101982

2017

2015

Business Strategy

agile

lean

design thinking

flowscapes

XPstorytelling

chaos theory

fractal theory

EQ neuroscience

psychology

mem

etics

biomim

icry

ruby

java

PHP

python

design patterns

smalltalk

film-m

aking

creative processes

NLP

philosophy

tequila

FORTH

value stream m

apping

typography

assembler

design

Let’s PlayABC Car Rentals

Gareth Powell PublishingAV Services

Caterpillar

Stanford University

Macquarie Bank

TelstraAustralian Defence Forces

3P Learning

Australian Gilt Securities

The Capital Group

Continental Power Exchange

Sydney Stock Exchange

Motorola

Swedish Railways

SAP

TrueSpace

National Australia BankCivica

The GAP

Cacheon

Western Asset M

anagement

US Interactive

▣ Programming Language ▣ Methodology ▣ Framework ▣ Field

ThoughtWorks AU

Countrywide

Helix Pagem

art

Republic Indemnity

Post Zentrum M

ülligen


I’ve lived hereI worked / stayed hereIt’s on my list

Zanzibar

Casablanca

Capetown

Rio de Janiero

Istanbul

Shanghai

Bueno Aires

Kathmandu

Mexico City

Santiago

Panama City

Paris

Zürich

London

Perth

AdelaideMelbourne

Sydney

Darwin

San FranciscoLos AngelesNew York

Columbus

Chicago

Dallas

Victoria

TokyoSeoul

Singapore

Bangalore

Pune

Tempere

StockholmBerlin

Moscow

Hanoi

Barcelona

Character

⌾ I speak human, so I never say things like customer-infused retailing. ⌾ Coriander: I hate it. Almost as much as I hate arbitrariness.

⌾ My memory is excellent and intermittently phonographic.

⌾ I’m obsessed with movies. I have trained in voice-over performance and film-making.

⌾ The sea is in my blood: half of my life I’ve lived by the beach. Someday I will live on a boat. ⌾ Paperwork is my kryptonite.

MY PERFECT FLIGHT OF TEQUILA

> okI LEARNED TO THINK AND CODE

FROM SMALLTALK & FORTH

miscellany

I ’M WRITING A COOK-BOOK: BLOWTORCH, BLENDER & BBQ

BOOKS THAT SHAPED MY BRAIN


I work at the nexus of technology and people and business to create great work that inspires people and

makes businesses

sing.

Back Story I was a hardcore hacker: Motorola's Iridium Project, JP Morgan Chase, the Human Genome Project, Swedish Railways, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. I coded in Smalltalk for 13 years, FORTH for 8. Also in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, COBOL and Assembler et al. My Ward Number is 2. Kent Beck personally “certified” me in XP.

I've been around: from JP Morgan to Greenpeace, from Stanford to startups. Industries? Scientific, Research, Telecommunications, Utilities, Banking, Education, Entertainment, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Medical, Nonprofit & Publishing. Macquarie Bank entrusted a whole department to me for 6 months (and I was a consultant.)

I've presented and trained all over the world. At the behest of the CEO, I trained the ThoughtWorks Australia offices in Agile in 2003/4, and created their first Lean SD training courses. I’ve taught Design Thinking internationally for SAP.

But tech is just an accelerant. An enabler. To get the most out of it you have to really understand what it’s trying to achieve and for who. You have to really understand business and you have to know what makes people tick. Developers. Leaders. Customers. Stakeholders. And to be able to bridge the gaps between them so they work together instead of at odds.

So in the last few decades I’ve spent as much time in the boardroom as in the trenches, working with c-suite to realise their strategy, coaching them in how to be better leaders and create amazing cultures. And I’ve spent endless hours studying philosophy and psychology to get a handle on the human side of the equation, coaching individuals and teams in how to better work done faster and have a better time doing it.

I was there at the beginning of the Agile, Design Patterns, Lean and Design Thinking movements. Wicked Problems is next—working at the edge of a whole new field of thinking. In fact, the Wicked Problems problem framework I helped develop is now being cited in other texts.

So now I combine them all. I work at the nexus of technology and people and business to create great work that inspires people and makes businesses sing.


Credits

Brief: Brought in to repair damaged IT↔ Biz dynamic, accelerate development team and coach leadership.

Outcome: Major improvements. Agile, Kanban & Design Thinking installed. 2nd largest tech IPO in Australian history to-date.

Brief: Train global SAP staff in Design Thinking.

Outcome: Contributed to courseware. Trained hundreds of staff on 5 continents, culminating in running a DT strategy workshop with 120+ participants at SAP’s annual global conference in Barcelona.

Brief: Deliver chairman’s first priority, APRA-mandated, media-visible, doomed and utterly paralysed 17-person project.

Outcome: Released project 10 weeks early with 5-person team. Minimal overhead, happy team. System still in use last time I looked.

Brief: Ran a Lean Value Stream Improvement on an agonising finance-product release process with an internal cross-functional team.

Outcome: Cost reduction of 80%. Revenue increase of 150%. Company-wide roll-out. ROI for my time approximately redonkulous.

Brief: Managed one of Macquarie’s IT department for 6 months as a “safe pair of hands” until new a new leader could be hired. (6 months).

Outcome: Installed a Lean project portfolio process. Massively reduced project churn. Improved visibility. Business/IT reconciled.

2007-2016

I was later asked to stand-in as Head of Product for some time.

I’m not making these numbers up — I have witnesses. None of us could believe it. This is why I'm still a VSI convert to this day.

I was a consultant when I did this, not an employee.

Management isn’t really my bag, so I used it as a platform for coaching and improvement.


Credits ThoughtWorks. CHANGE CONSULTANT As Change Consultant, ran organisational transformation projects, typically introducing Agile and Lean processes. Eg:

⌾ Nationwide Financial Services: (Columbus, Ohio) Permanently changed client’s software development practices, introducing automated testing, new project chartering and management processes.

⌾ JP Morgan Chase: (Wall Street) Co-trainer of JPMC’s on-line banking team in XP and Agile practices with Kent Beck. From CMM 1 to CMM 3 in < 6 months.

PRACTICE LEAD As Practice Lead, prime developer of ThoughtWorks’ Organisational Transformation service offering: processes, collateral, presenting, support, sales and coaching. Example project:

⌾ Reporting to ThoughtWorks’ CEO, relocated from U.S. to the ThoughtWorks Australia offices for a year to train & develop staff, manage engagement risk and ensure organisational growth.

⌾ Salvaging an at-risk multi-million dollar project. Significantly increasing staff retention and morale nationwide. Defined the baseline consulting methodology (still used), and training all offices & staff, improving engagement quality.

CLIENT PRINCIPAL As Client Principal, responsible for commercials, staffing, delivery assurance and building relationships with marquee clients, i.e.:

⌾ Stanford University: (Menlo Park, California) Ran three projects across Stanford’s 20,000 person campus:

Coached a Stanford/ThoughtWorks team in Agile as they rewrote Stanford’s enterprise identity lifecycle management system. Restructured Stanford’s PMO, including reporting and processes. Verified Stanford’s administrative systems strategy.

According to Stanford’s CIO, this release was, “The smoothest release in Stanford memory”.

ThoughtWorks CEO Roy Singham later hailed this assignment as, “an unmitigated success”.

2002-2007

Usually I work independently, but during this period I was an employee of ThoughtWorks, a boutique global IT consultancy with offices worldwide.


Credits

Corporate Architect - Mystery Start-up: (Silicon Valley) Day-to-day management of engineering team, heavy-lifting architecture of parallel processing & distributed computing framework. Dealing with investors. Then the dot bomb dropped.

Consultant/Internal Process Improvement - US Interactive: (Los Angeles) Through automation, Knowledge Management & Agile techniques, compressed first phase of engagement by over 30% (saving several at-risk engagements).

Trainer/Systems Optimiser - Objectivity: (San Jose based, consulting in Europe and US) Rescued giant US telecom carrier’s ailing real-time voicemail system – investigating, profiling and optimisation - in three days; increasing performance 170%. Plus training/troubleshooting for customers such as: I2, Swedish Railways and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator: 1TB/hour ingest rate!). And troubleshooting on Motorola’s Iridium project.

Architect/Trainer/Negotiator - Metro Water District: (Los Angeles & San Francisco) Negotiated extensions to UBA (Utility Business Alliance) standards with a bunch of politicos. That was hard. Trained team of 12, led architecture team, designed and built prototype of real-time water treatment QA system in < 3 months.

Technology Advisor - Human Genome Project: (Seattle, Washington) Advised on technology and taxonomy/architecture foundation for allele-demographic-mutation database sub-project (mapping allele mutation to socio-economic, hereditary and environmental factors).

Architect and Operations Manager - Continental Power Exchange: (Los Angeles) Designed and developed world’s first electricity trading system running on a distributed object-oriented database. Provided front line client support, maintained platform and wrote loads of code.

Programmer/Architect - Mystery Top 5 Global Investment Manager: (Orange County, California) Sourced as one of international team of “Smalltalk Experts”. Built Object-Relational database access layer: IBM OS2/Presentation Manager through a 3270 terminal, CICS, an AS400 and DB2 on the back end. Insane. (It worked.)

Technology Consultant - Stock Exchange: (Sydney) Investigated and advised on technology to replace the traders’ string-pegs-and-coloured-pieces-of-paper for managing trades on the chaotic trading floor. After two days advised ,“leave them alone”; no tech existing could compete with the coloured pegs. President v. happy.

Mr. Fix-It - Greenpeace: (Perth) Volunteered for three months to set up telecoms for Greenpeace office, Perth. Email, Fax, Bulletin board, etc. Didn’t have to wear a suit. Saved a whale.

And many more…

CIO Jim Letts later wrote, “I wish this had been my idea, but it was Rob’s” in his company wide email.

Foolish or not, I’m always aiming to put myself out of a job if it’s in the client’s best interests.

Prior-

2002

Real-time CORBA orbs—in Space!

Page of 9 9

Epilogue In case you didn’t notice, I’m very good at dealing with catastrophes and cluster-fucks. If you have one — or have a friend who does ! — please get in touch.

Also get in touch if you need Agile, Lean or Design Thinking training, consulting or coaching.

Or if you need consulting, facilitation or coaching on strategy, culture, leadership or innovation. Anywhere that people, business and technology intersect.

There’s a whole list of typical workshops and engagements people hire me for on the website.

WAYS TO GET IN TOUCH WITH ME:

✉ [email protected]

# +61 433 919 576

robgibson.me (website)

au.linkedin.com/in/flowscape

instagram.com/flowscape

vimeo.com/flowscape

twitter.com/flowscape

© rob gibson 2016

How ca

n I he

lp you

?

mailto:[email protected]

http://robgibson.me

http://au.linkedin.com/in/flowscape

http://instagram.com/flowscape

http://vimeo.com/flowscape

http://twitter.com/flowscape

mailto:[email protected]

http://robgibson.me

http://au.linkedin.com/in/flowscape

http://instagram.com/flowscape

http://vimeo.com/flowscape

http://twitter.com/flowscape