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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
Page of 3 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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
Page of 4 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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
Page of 5 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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.
Page of 6 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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.
Page of 7 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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.
Page of 8 9 rob gibson — curriculum vitæ
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:
# +61 433 919 576
robgibson.me (website)
au.linkedin.com/in/flowscape
instagram.com/flowscape
vimeo.com/flowscape
twitter.com/flowscape
© rob gibson 2016
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