I’m David Hicks, Agile Alliance Founder Member, and co-founder and Director of RADTAC, the UK-based Agile services company. Have a look at this video to see me talk about Agile to the British Computer Society. You can follow me on Twitter here and connect with me on LinkedIn here.

I got into this line of work in 1987 through my Masters degree thesis on iterative development which was published by the British Computer Society. I started my career in the hey-day of the waterfall as an analyst-programmer, team leader and ultimately project manager with a company called LBMS. LBMS were the originators of the PRINCE, SSADM and LSDM methods. This was their main business .... but I was responsible for defining LBMS’s first iterative SDLC and worked with a lot of the early large 4GLs and client-server applications doing iterative development.

My career in Agile really took-off in the early 90’s when I started to use DSDM and became a certified Practitioner and Trainer. As an independent consultant in 1997 I was hired by British Airways to manage the implementation of DSDM as the standard method across their 5,000-strong IT organisation. I managed this Programme for nearly four years, and learned an awful lot about enterprise-Agile and organisational change. It also led me onto the Heathrow Terminal 5 project in 1998 which is where I first started using Scrum. A trip from Heathrow to a conference in 2001 is particularly memorable because I was asked by the organisers to give Ken Schwaber a lift in my car. I’d read his stuff but never met him before ... and of course by the time we arrived three hours later, I was totally converted!

I joined the Agile Alliance as a Founder member in 2002 and have been doing Agile consulting, training and coaching in a whole range of different contexts ever since, using the full range of Agile approaches including Scrum, XP,  Lean, DSDM and the Open/Agile Unified Process.  I am a regular speaker on the Agile conference circuit and hold the following Agile qualifications:

- Certified Scrum Trainer

- Certified Lean IT Trainer

- Certified APMG Agile Project Management Trainer

- Certified DSDM Agile Trainer

- Certified Scrum Practitioner

- Certified DSDM Agile Advanced Practitioner

- Certified Scrum Master

- Certified Scrum Product Owner

- Certified Agile Leadership Practitioner

Today a large part of my role is to provide Agile consulting, training and coaching services to our major clients. At the time of writing in 2011 much of my time is being spent with a RADTAC team who are doing Scrum and XP consulting, training and coaching for an international organisation of over 2,200 software engineers. We have done bigger enterprise-Agile enablement gigs, but this one is particularly interesting as pretty much everyone is working on the same product which consists of complex low-level system software. The communication and alignment challenges between some 200 Scrum teams across 13 geographies are quite significant as I’m sure you can imagine!

Outside work I live in the beautiful countryside of SW England. I’m married, have two daughters age 10 and 8, and for R&R indulge my passion for collecting and racing Ducati motorcycles.

Student Comments from my Certified Scrum Training Classes