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Presentation: "Climbing out of a crisis loop: How a critical BBC back-end team reigned in a workflow crisis-to-crisis cycle"

Track: Agile in Actuality: Stories from the Front Line / Time: Thursday 11:30 - 12:20 / Location: Whittle Room

Driven by desperation when agile methods didn't seem to work 'straight out of the box' - how a BBC team (handling a critical legacy back-end system with complex team inter-dependencies and a plethora of demanding 'priority one' stakeholders) collaborated themselves out of a severe crisis loop by bending the 'rules' and combining multiple agile and JFDI 'methods'.

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Katherine Kirk, Independent Consultant & Researcher

Katherine Kirk

Biography: Katherine Kirk

Now an independent consultant and researcher, Katherine has solid experience contracting and freelancing in a variety of roles within the IT and Media industries: from blue chip investment banking to media conglomerates. Most recently she spent time as an Agile Coach at Rally after a period consulting as Delivery Improvement Specialist, Project Manager and Agile Coach at the BBC in the Future Media division in London. Katherine often finds herself specifically tasked with working with really "troubled" projects, where simplistic solutions don't quite cut it.

She is an active participant of a community of Lean and Agile practitioners in Europe who explore and challenge the status quo through experimenting and collaborating and is particularly interested in contextually driven edge-cases and the cultural interaction between hierarchical management and Agile teams. She supports this interest by studying an MSc in Software Engineering at University of Oxford, specializing in Process Improvement, Managing Quality and Risk, and Software Systems Security. Katherine also holds a first class BSc (Hons) Multimedia Computing.

Rafiq Gemmail, Dreamthought Technologies

Rafiq Gemmail

Biography: Rafiq Gemmail

Raf is based in Cornwall, from where he runs Dreamthought Technologies Ltd, an Agile biased software consulting firm. He has worked as a software engineer for over thirteen years, developing enterprise solutions in the industries of investment banking, e-commerce, data-services, telecommunications and media. His client projects have included performance optimisation for the BBC's iPlayer and development of market reference data systems within ING and Morgan Stanley. He is currently on contract at Headforwards Ltd in Cornwall, developing cloud virtualisation software in a Kanban team by the sea.

Raf is a proponent for lean practices, TDD and home-schooling. He has soft spots for Modern Perl, Scala and node.js.

Twitter: @fiqus