IAN PRITCHARD Leader ScrumMaster Engineer Personal
Team Skills

I am an experienced technology leader with a proven record of helping employees grow, helping teams become more efficient and collaborative, and improving results in an agile framework.

As a scrum-master, I helped teams adopt KanBan and scrum.

Each of them continued improving until they were judged as high performing teams.

But, of course, even then they continued to improve!

Now I mentor and teach budding scrum-masters. It's a delight to see them grow in the role.

I started my career in engineering as a highly rated developer.

As a leader, I keep up with industry trends and I spend my free time learning and using new technologies

It's important to me that I can talk knowledgeably with engineers, and that I can roll up my sleeves and dive into code if needed.

Leader
Mentor - Coach - Connector

I lead a team of high performing engineers. I foster a team culture of transparency, respect, curiosity and fun.

My current team creates and maintains API's to receive data and send data between vendors and internal systems as well as building full stack applications using new and legacy technologies.

Build systems from the ground up? Been there!
Enhance and maintain systems in modern tech stacks? Done that!
Keep creaking legacy systems alive and well fed? Got the accolades!
MENTOR

The best part of my day is spent mentoring team members to help them grow their careers, whether developing deeper technical skills or preparing for leadership roles.

The key to my mentoring approach is listen, listen and listen. Before you talk!

COACH

I love to coach people and watch them grow as people and as technologists!

I advocate the GROW model as a coaching framework. In fact, I demonstrate it to anyone who will listen!

I have led teams in a transformation from Waterfall to Kanban and Scrum, and it was a wild, fun journey

CONNECTOR

A role I play frequently is that of connector. I know I don't have all the answers, so I find who does, and I make fruitful introductions.

But relationships are like flowers. You can't just plant them walk away. I make sure my mentees know I am there to help if the connection isn't what we hoped for.

Other People's Words

I will always remember you as a leader who protected the team and allowed us to experiment and learn (and grow).
- direct report

Great job with career development with your team.
The way you establish connections allows people to grow in their career aspirations.
- peer leader

I appreciate your willingness to listen, discuss, and brainstorm options for us to improve as a leadership team.
- senior director

Your words of encouragement are what drives me to do great work. I look forward to continuing work with you on shaping my career.
- direct report

Ian had positive feedback coming in from his peers on performance. A conscientious leader, approachable, always willing to listen & help, solid at coaching / mentoring. Eager to grow himself, open to feedback, guides his team and plays the servant leader role well. He has been great at forming a positive culture within his team.
- senior director

Ian's thought leadership and tremendous support resulted in dramatic improvements in the software being created as well as notable advancements in how the teams worked more effectively together. His team's accomplishments became a blueprint for successful progress that has been picked up by other teams within the company. Having had this time and experience together, I consider him to be an exceptional proponent of software engineering and delivery excellence.
- senior director

Scrum Master
Improving Agility - Building Scrum Masters - Certifications - SAFE

I am a lifelong learner, and even though I have years of scrum-master experience under my belt, I still subscribe to several blogs to keep improving my agile and scrum knowledge.

Improving Agility

A huge part of working with an agile team is to convince them that

they want to continuously improve
they can continuously improve
they will continuously improve!

Once you have that commitment, set the stage by helping each team member be comfortable with introspection and change, advocate for a retrospective every sprint, show the team how it is done and sit back and watch the magic happen!


I have had a few 'aha' moments throughout my career.

You can only try to change one or two things at once- or you could experience churn and chaos
Run each change as an experiment - measuring results against expected results. Or how do you know this is succesful?
Celebrate the duds as well as the successes. All improvement comes from bravery, and courage should be rewarded.
Building Scrum Masters

It's much more rewarding to build future scrum masters than do it all yourself!

I have been lucky enough to work with extremely talented people in my career, and some of them wanted to build their servant leader skills to become scrum masters.

Through no fault of my own, they succeeded!

SAFE

Sometimes you need to go big. Businesses like to see long term plans and your answer can't be to explain the short sprint planning cycle and the cone of uncertainty.

A potential answer to projecting what a collection of teams can build over the longer term is 'SAFE'.

I have been involved in full-on SAFE and SAFE-dabbling. Both work well as long as your customers know that it works well, but it can never be perfect. Perhaps remind them of the times we spent months planning in Waterfall and still failed to deliver with quality, on-time and on-budget?

At the end of the day, even if you are practicing SAFE, if you are working in an agile manner, you should get the benefits of a short feedback loop.

Since you encourage customers to change their minds as they see the product you are building, they can be happy that you are not entirely sticking to your 3 month plan!

Certification

Professional Scrum Masterâ„¢ I (PSM I)

from Scrum.org

Other People's Words

Under his leadership I was able to expand my understanding of agile software development from the Scrum Master perspective and helped to put my own stamp on the team's efforts, laying the groundwork for my moving into a full time role with the company.
- direct report

Engineer
Early Engineer

I fell in love with developing systems from a very early age (age 12, in fact)

It started with a minute here and a minute there on a share of a mainframe at school.

After working back-breaking hours in farmer's fields, I saved enough so that with my parents' help I bought an early home computer running BASIC with 1K of memory.

It wasn't too long before I was teamed up with a friend, selling copies of my first game to computer gaming shops.

Although my primary job is more stratrgic than hands-on coding, I spend my spare time learning new tech stacks and putting them into practice.

Hackathoneer

I was part of a winning team in a company sponsored Hackathon. The prototype application we built is the foundation for a multi-year project to transform and expand part of the enterprise's value strategy for clients. That makes me happy!

As well as encouraging the team to remain agile and stick to mini-sprints throughout design and development, I served as the data engineer to create mock data to feed a complex vendor APIS

This website is a very basic example of my work and my philosophy.

I could have built it by buying a template and filling in the blanks, but I decided it would be more rewarding to code it by hand using industry-standard tech like sass and javascript

My next plan is to convert it to Typescript!

My current fascination is the similarities and differences between javascript and python. They are a lot more alike than you'd think.

I am creating a few tools and fun projects to show this. I may even go open source!

If you want the tl/dr technical details behind building this site, press the button below

To see the tech stack used to make this site.


Show Me More
AWS DevOps

I became interested in DevOps, especially as it relates to AWS so I became certified (twice-since my certification expired and I had to recertify)

It's a long, gruelling, fun journey!



Other People's Words

Congratulations in taking first place in the Hackathon!
This is a big achievement and inspiration for others. Your constant innovation is much appreciated.
- co-worker

Certifications

AWS Certifications

Cloud Practitioner
Associate Solutions Architect

Scrum.org Certifications

Certified Scrum Developer
Certified Scrum Master

Personal Life

You won't find this content in LinkedIn!

Job Hunter Warning
This is more personal-more about the rest of my life.

if you're surfing this site to consider me for a job, you probably shouldn't look below here

because some of this is content you wouldn't be allowed to ask me about in an interview!

I am a deeply committed Christian, and this underpins everything I do.

I love taking photos and built a successful business selling them as fine art in art shows.

You can see my photos in public places, private collections, hanging in conference rooms and on media like calendars, books and websites

I am rebuilding my gallery website

Check back soon!

I love to assemble words!

I started with traditional short stories and over the years tightened my language through making my stories shorter.

For instance, I wrote a lot of stories that contain 55 words or less. This was too wordy, so I moved to stories that fit in a tweet (140 characters) and haikus.

Ironically, this may be my longest piece of writing for years!

My Faith

I am a deeply committed Christian, and this underpins everything I do

The prayer I most often say is:

Lord, please balance my life with You at its center.

I am experimenting with combining meditation with prayer. I keep repeating this 'mantra'

As I repeat each part, I imagine God's love flowing around me, sinking into me, and causing me to be kind to others.

Your love around me
Your love within me
Your love through me
Thank You, God
Photographer
Love at first camera

My love of photography started when I bought myself a second hand Olympus camera.

I earned the money for it picking potatoes out of frosty ground for farmers.

It's fun growing up in a rural area!

Milwaukee Photos

For ten years, I spent a lot of my time under canvas selling my photos at some Art Fairs

I sold a lot of prints, and made a lot of friends (fellow artists and customers)

I am still contacted by people who saw my photos in private and public collections, in magazines, in calendars and on websites.

As well as teaching me how great people are, I developed a business theory!


A Theory of Customer Distance
Writer
The long and short of stories

I started writing at a young age. It just felt right.

Right from the start I would call my style light hearted.

Silly even (according to my teachers).


After enough of this feedback, I decided to become

a serious writer.


This led to my writing utter rubbish....

...which consisted primarily of lovingly crafted, gorgeously constructed drivel. The essays were written not for reader comprehension but were designed to show how brilliantly gifted I must be because I am eminently capable of generating acres of painstakingly honed prose. This was obviously necessary to demonstrate my surgical command of this kind of flowery, descriptive language; jam packed with a host of deliciously superfluous arcane adverbs and adjectives, topped off with a generous sprinkling of stunningly preposterous prepositions to show my command of the English language and extensive vocabulary.

Annoying, isn't it?


and I had stopped having fun!


I was saved by finding a book of stories with 55 words or less.


Which is obviously impossible.


So much to say! so few words!

My eyes were opened.

My first 55 word story took days to make (shorter takes much longer, as it turns out).

Over time, I got faster, and learned ways of rearranging my thinking to fit the word limit rather than just cutting out words here and there


Shorter still

Then came Twitter.


I found writers who were writing entire stories in a 140 character Twitter post.


Which is obviously impossible.


So much to say! In so few characters!


But I was off again, writing in these categories.

Hover / click on the cards below to see examples.

Haiku
This is a Japanese poetry form.

It is structured in 3 lines

With 5, 7, and 5 syllables

Haiku
A couple of examples

the streets lined with gold?

oily sheen reflects the moon

where I sleep tonight



traitorous plumbing

gargles menacingly and

threatens to explode

Twitter story

A story that fits in a Twitter post!

It has to be 140 characters or less.

Twitter story
A couple of examples

It's tough to be an optimist when you've fallen through a window and you're half full of glass.



Sucking blood oranges, the vampires in the nursing home warned bored children about the perils of bad dental hygiene.

Six Word Stories

Really! A complete story expressed in only 6 words

Six Word Stories
A few examples

A tourist in his own kitchen


Hard boiled thugs walking on eggshells


I'm always awake in my dreams


My bathroom scales are ruthlessly truthful

Nine Word Stories

For when 6 words just isn't enough

Nine Word Stories
A few examples

Bees drinking mead thinking "why didn't we invent this?"


The tongue depressor worked. My mouth is blue.


Winter sunrise, showered with snow and bathed in gold.

Micro Poetry

It may rhyme or not, but it's still wee poetry!

Mad Chef Skills

I'm a real great chef - an achiever with a cleaver.

Cooking with Soul and creating chili fever.

I poach and I blanch. I fricassee and boil.

I work with special spices and exotic oil.

But now the law won't let me do my work

Cause I killed those folks with the poisoned jerk.

55 Word Stories

I don't know who chose 55 words as an upper limit or why, but it's a thing!

Waiting For Trains

I told the waiting stranger, "Trains don't stop her any more."

He looked at me, the sadness of ages in his eyes.

"They do for me", he sighed.

Just then a ghostly whistle came from the tunnel and he raised his flag.

"All aboard!" he called mournfully.

Long Short Stories

I started out by writing traditional short stories.

Long Short Stories

There is just not enough room for a whole short story on 1 wee flip card


I'm working on a website of my writing to showcase my longer pieces.


In the meantime, have a look around Tiny Fiction

And my tiny Twitter page was born.


One of its main characters is McFoible whose name really sums him up!

The Rest Of Me
My Mission Statement

I am a big fan of '7 Habits of Highly Successful People' and wrote a mission statement as it recommends. My mission is informed by my faith. Since I love to write succinctly, I translated my mission statement to a haiku.

Later on, of course, I had to add a second one!

Hover over the hidden haiku to see it!

strive always to spread

smiles, laughter and a sense

of possibility
enhance my senses

with a sense of wonder and

curiosity
Immigrant

I visited the USA on a working visa quite a few years ago. The visa allowed me to live and work here for 7 years.

My intention, though, was just to stay a year. I planned to travel the 7 continents in 7 years.

However, within a few weeks I had unexpectedly fallen in love! Eventually I married, and applied for a Green Card.

I am still married to the sweetheart who stole my heart in those early days, and now I am a dual citizen of the UK and the USA.

People often ask me if I miss Scotland-the country of my youth and early adulthood. I do miss the people, and the annual

Hogmanay (Scottish New Year) celebration which, in my old home-town, features genuine balls of fire!

Runner

I am a keen runner, frequently taking part in 5K and 10K races.

I try to run a destination half-marathon each year- my favourite being the Key West Half Marathon.

I'm not particularly fast (~9 minute miles), but I get there!

Recently I decided I'd try for a 25 minute 5K run-which I did once when I was much, much younger. I'm getting closer! I managed 25:25 at one race.

Lynn, the love of my life (and, luckily, also my wife) shares my passion, but she runs more frequently on the coldest winter days than I do!

Devil Sticking

I know it sounds strange for a committed Christian to play with something called a Devil Stick as a hobby!

It's a form of juggling, and it can be combined with fire (more of that later).

I started juggling in my days living in Edinburgh between my student dats and my first real job. Money was tight at the time, so I started off juggling potatoes! I had to swap them out every couple of weeks as they grew soft and were converted to stovies (a Scottish staple food).

Eventually I found 3 golf balls in a second hand shop, and I started juggling these instead. They last longer, but cause more damage when you throw them in the wrong direction!

My flatmate, probably bored of the golf balls flying in random trajectories, told me about a local circus skills club and I started to attend.

It was brilliant!

I met such interesting people, doing a variety of interesting stunts.

There were many professional buskers and folks training for the circus. And I never knew what I would see next.

While 1 person stood for hours spinning a tray on his fingers and toes, another performer would balance on a 10-foot ladder, trading juggling clubs with a partner on a 12-foot unicycle.

Meanwhile people tried the weird stuff like the spinning bolas or trapping 3 cigar boxes

And there were so many difficult 3-7 ball juggling tricks with exotic names like the Mills Mess

Outside is where the fiery stuff happened!

Other than the fire, I tried most of the equipment, and settled on the Devil Stick as my go-to toy.

It's a center stick that you toss from one hand stick to another and throw in the odd spin around or balance trick

If you do it right, it's a lot harder than it looks! I'm not sure I ever do it right though.

I promised you fire. I tried it once. It was fun but terrifying. Every instinct is to get as far away from the flames as possible.

This isn't me but you get the idea!

DON'T TRY THIS YOURSELF.

It is at least as dangerous as it looks!

Paper Shirts

One of my many wee hobbies over the years was Origami-the art of paper folding.

Not the best folder in the world, I did the normal array of asymmetrical cranes, dive bombing airplanes, inside-out newspaper hats and boats that were guaranteed to sink along with a few more adventurous

projects like lopsided giraffes and crooked elephants

Then one day I discovered dollar bill Origami! I managed to perfect a model I saw in a book-a dress shirt worth a dollar!

I was off to the races! For years I added one to tips in restaurants.

You should try it-it's easy, fun, and apparently impressive.

Jam Berries

I know what you're thinking. What on earth are jam berries. Read on!

I use storytelling a lot to help explain concepts to teams.

Because I grew up in a rural area, I worked for farmers over most holidays. In fact, in Scotland

we even have a set of holidays called the Tattie Holidays. 'Tattie' is Scots for potato, and we spent these holidays picking potatoes for farmers for a pittance.

Other work we did was daffodil harvesting and strawberry picking.

So, this is where jam berries come in!

So often, people tell us they want one thing and then incentivize the opposite. Like the customer help desk that is measured by the number of calls per hour. The managers of the desk can emphasize the importance of individualized customer service all they want, but idf employees are rewarded for dealing with customers fast, then that is what will happen!

The way I bring this concept to life is through jam berries.

The farmers who paid us pennies to pick strawberries didn't want waste. There are a certain amount of berries which are not good enough for the punnet. They may be bruised, or been carelessly picked where they were squished or lost their green foliage. So, the berry pickers are given 2 buckets-1one for good berries and one for the damaged berries which, I am sure you guessed are used to make jam-the jam berries.

At the end of the first day of picking the farmer would line the pickers up, and check our buckets. If we had a higher jam-berry to regular berry proportion, (s)he would assume we were being careless and dock our pay or even fire us on the spot-telling us not to darken these hallowed berry fields again.

So, what did the pickers do with damaged berries the next day? Personally, I ate them. Others used them as missiles to throw at their friends and enemies. None of us put them in the jam bucket!

What did the farmer want? No wasted berries!

What did (s)he incentivize? Very few jam berries

What did (s)he get? Wasted berries!

I always wonder whether the jam factories wondered what happened to their dwindling supplies!

That is one of my favourite stories, but I have many others. Each to illustrate some point in a way people won't easily forget.

I o get a kick when I see desired behavious being disincentivized and someone on a team I serve pointing out 'That's another case of jam berries!'

Snowshoeing Next?

I think sowshoeing might be my next thing. I just sent away for an awesome pair, and this year I get to look forward to snow! Let's see how I go

Wish me luck