-
Heritage to Horizons: Leading Change at Checkatrade
I joined Checkatrade just over a year ago. In that time, our team has undergone a dynamic digital transformation; retiring monolithic systems, scaling incident management, launching a new consumer app, and embracing AI. Was it easy? No. Nope. Not at all. No way. Was it worth it? Oh my gosh yes. Here’s how we tackled…
-
How We Decommissioned Heritage (Without Toppling the Tower)
This year I inherited Checkatrade’s long running ‘Heritage Switch Off’ project. All previous attempts had stalled, the supporting documentation was scattered to the wind, and all past contributors had left. The stakeholders offered me a bold suggestion: failure-driven migration. Flip the off-switch and fix whatever breaks. I had to make the tough call to take…
-
Long Live Agility
Agile has come to mean doing half of Scrum badly and using Jira. – Andy Hunt, manifesto co-author One of my favourite talks was Agile is Dead by Dave Thomas from GOTO Amsterdam 2015. Dave is one of the manifesto for agile software development authors and quite a charismatic and enjoyable guy to talk to.…
-
Reading List
Here is a collection of books I’ve picked up over the years, with some of my thoughts.