Adrian has been an IT professional since the 90’s. He studied a B.Com degree with information systems as a major, whereafter he embarked on a career in the industry. His first job from university was software development in a small insurance business. He was a one man IT department, responsible for gathering requirements, writing and testing software with users and deploying it into production. This gave him a solid grounding in the whole software development lifecycle.
After two years working abroad in the UK, Adrian returned to South Africa and joined Staffware as an implementation consultant for their BPM software. He was exposed to blue chip clients in various key industries such as telecoms, insurance and banking. After five years at Staffware, he left to found his own implementation company, Procentrica, with two partners, providing specialist system implementation skills in the BPM and systems integration worlds. Being a business owner for 10 years taught Adrian many valuable lessons about the importance of staff development, sales and customer service.
In 2015, Adrian left Procentrica and joined FNB as a permanent employee. He held various positions in the integrations centre of excellence before being invited to join an agile coaching development programme for his broader department of 1 600 people. In his time as agile coach, Adrian was lucky enough to work with over 30 teams across at least 5 portfolios in the core banking applications division. He learned to connect with CIO’s and leadership teams as he helped them on their change journey to agile ways of working. In his role as change agent, Adrian arranged monthly agile guild sessions and lean coffees to which all agilists in First Rand were invited.
Adrian’s skills as an agile coach grew over time and after some experimentation, he settled on an engagement model for new teams; firstly focusing on connecting with leadership and explaining the agile journey to them, then entering and training their delivery teams followed by several months of intensive coaching.