Digitalisation now and post-Covid19 with Martin Walsh
Martin cut his teeth as an early AWS pioneer leading two of the largest migrations in the world in the early naughties. He now has 15 years’ experience in Digital Strategy, Cloud Architecture and Digital Operating models and has provided best practice cloud usage, DevOps/Agile operating models and technical leadership to some of the world’s largest companies.
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Enjoy,
Toby
Watch the full episode…
Martin’s Links
https://www.thinkabove.cloud/
Books mentioned:
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win Paperback by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr > view on Amazon
The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, by Gene Kim , Patrick Debois , et al > view on Amazon
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, by Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble > view on Amazon
Digital Assests, Digital Currencies, Central Banks, and Facebook’s Libra with Jannah Patchay
Welcome to another edition of Wicked Problems.
Jannah Patchay is a subject matter expert and consultant in the financial markets sector who specialises in financial markets innovation, and helping firms define, develop and execute commercial strategies in a highly regulated environment.
Her passion is for market structure and finding creative solutions to the challenges surrounding access to markets and liquidity for both traditional financial markets and asset classes, and the emerging field of digital asset market structure and regulation – the subject of today’s show.
Jannah has assisted in the launch of new trading venues, businesses, products and services, interpreting and implementing new regulations, and advising on regulatory, business and operational strategy.
She is a Founder Member and Regulatory Advocacy Ambassador for the London Blockchain Foundation, and a freelance journalist for Best Execution magazine, where she regularly covers financial innovation topics.
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Financial Market Risk during Covid19 with Jan-Peter Onstwedder
Risk! There’s definitely some going around at the moment, whether it’s markets, business continuity, or popping to the corner shop – risk is everywhere.
My guest today is Jan-Peter Onstwedder.
Jan-Peter has over 25 years experience in risk management across a wide variety of asset classes and global trading markets, both in a banking and a corporate environment.
Currently he works as Chief Risk and Technology Officer for Pavilion Energy, an LNG trading company in Singapore, specialising in trading liquified natural gas.
With various ‘head of’ titles, Jan-Peter has lead different aspects of management at Citi Bank, the venture capital firm 3i PLC, BP’s integrated supply and trading business, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and ICE Clear Europe.
In 2007 he managed the London Accord, the then-largest ever collaborative research project into the financial aspects of climate change. He has retained an interest in alternative energy and continues to act as a reviewer and judge for the annual “Farsight Awards”, part of the City of London’s annual sustainability awards.
Jan-Peter has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a degree in mechanical engineering from Delft University of Technology in his native Netherlands.
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Jan-Peter has over 25 years experience in risk management across a wide variety of asset classes and global trading markets, both in a banking and a corporate environment.
Currently he works for Pavilion Energy, an LNG trading company in Singapore, as Chief Risk and Technology Officer.
From 2011 until 2019 he was at Citi in London as head of risk management for the global commodities trading division, and as global head of credit risk for the energy and commodity portfolios.
In 2007 he managed the London Accord, the then-largest ever collaborative research project into the financial aspects of climate change. The report, published in December 2007, placed research by leading investment banks, NGOs, law firms and academic institutions into the public domain. Jan-Peter has retained an interest in alternative energy and continues to act as a reviewer and judge for the annual “Farsight Awards”, part of the City of London’s annual sustainability awards.
Until March 2011 Jan-Peter was Head of Risk Management for 3i plc, the UK private equity firm, where he was also responsible for the valuation of the unquoted investment portfolio.
From 2001 to 2006 Jan-Peter was Head of Risk for BP’s Integrated Supply and Trading business (BP’s in-house commodity and energy trading division) where he established and managed a global risk function with responsibility for market, credit and operational risk.
Prior to 2001 he worked as Head of Market Risk for the Royal Bank of Scotland, and held various risk and trading positions for Barclays Bank in London and New York.
In addition, from October 2009 until July 2011 Jan-Peter was a non-executive Director and Chair of the Energy Risk Committee for ICE Clear Europe, a UK Recognised Clearing House.
Jan-Peter has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a degree in mechanical engineering from Delft University of Technology in his native Netherlands.
Alderman and Sheriff Professor Michael Mainelli on Covid19, The Price of Fish, and Long Finance
Michael Mainelli is the executive chairman of ZYen group. A qualified accountant, a securities professional, a computer specialist and a management consultant.
Educated at Harvard Universisty and Trinity College, Dublin and gained his PhD at the London School of Economics, where he was also a visiting professor of innovation and IT.
His career spans aerospace and cartography science, accountancy firm partner and director of Ministry of Defence research.
Micheal founded and chairs ZYen, the City of London’s leading commercial think tank, famous for instrumental factor indices, including the Global Financial Centre’s Index, Global Green Finance Index, and Smart Centre’s Index.
Michael has helped found numerous technology and financial firms and over the years his clients have included virtually all major investment banks, as well as many exchanges, insurers, fund managers, regulators, and financial information providers.
Michael is Emeritus Professor, Fellow, & Trustee at Gresham College where he created the London Finance initiative asking “when would we know our financial system is working?”
He is non-executive director of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, Fellow of Goodenough College, Trustee of Morden College, and Alderman for Broad Street.
Michael is past Master of the World Traders and a liveryman of the Furniture Makers, Water Conservators, and Marketors, as well as a Craft-Owning Freeman of the Watermen & Lightermen.
His third book, The Price of Fish: A New Approach to Wicked Economics and Better Decisions, won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize.
His interests include skiing, woodcarving, glassblowing, bagpipes, racing sailboats and sailing Thames barges.
Michael has the honour of being Sheriff of the City of London 2019-2021.
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Pandemic Fitness: How to keep fit during lockdown with Martin Christie
With the world in lockdown, how do you get the right amount of exercise? Exercise videos abound on the internet. Most of which provide a vital service to people seeking to stay fit. However, the majority are aimed at those who already have a certain level of fitness and flexibility.
So, is there an exercise routine that works for all, regardless of fitness level? My guest today, Martin Christie certainly thinks so.
In 2003 Martin introduced Nordic Walking to the UK, forming the company Nordic Walking U.K and developed the first instructor training courses to be approved by the Register of exercise professionals.
Nordic Walking UK is the U.K’s largest outdoor fitness provider with over 2,000 weekly classes nationwide.
In 2020 Martin and the team launched WALX, a true health club without walls, offering a range of outdoor walking fitness programmes to suit all abilities.
Within WALX and Nordic Walking UK today, Martin leads the devlopment of the education programmes, creating training courses to educate instructors and leaders, ranging from community volunteers to neuro-physiotherapists.
Martin is an active member of Parkinsons UK active exercise hub, the network at the forefront of advising on exercise for people with Parkinsons.
He also regularly delivers hospital based training programmes to physiotherapists.
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Enjoy,
Toby
About Martin
In 2003, Martin introduced Nordic walking to the country, formed Nordic Walking UK and developed the first instructor training courses approved by the Register of Exercise Professionals. Nordic Walking UK can lay claim to being the UK’s largest outdoor fitness provider with over 2000 weekly classes available nationwide. In 2020, the team launched WALX, a true health-club-without-walls, offering a range of outdoor walking fitness programmes to suit all abilities.
Within WALX & Nordic Walking UK today, Martin leads the development of its education programmes, creating training courses to educate instructors and leaders ranging from community volunteers to neurophysiotherapists.
To remain current and relevant, Martin owns and manage WALXhampstead. WALXhampstead delivers a range of fitness walking classes weekly in north London. He is an active member of Parkinson’s UK Exercise Hub, the network at the forefront of advising on exercise for people with Parkinson’s. He regularly delivers hospital-based training programmes to physiotherapists.
I first met Aino at a conference in London. I was late into a session and she graciously signalled that the seat next to her was free. Being the under educated man that I am, I had no idea that I was now sitting next to the day’s keynote speaker, a fact that didn’t reveal itself even when we were paired up for an exercise that involved sharing our earliest memories of soft toys. (Yes, really!)
(If you’re interested: my first memory is with a teddy bear called ‘Growl’ – the fantastically and originally named blue bear that someone had given to me on the momentous occasion of my birth. Growl would ‘growl’ when he moved forward and also stood at double my height – I think you can picture why I came to remember him!)
It wasn’t until the keynote session itself that I found out that Aino was the keynote speaker. To the delight of the audience she gave a speech on the importance of being funny within the workplace, which was in fact, very funny!
In this podcast episode we talk about retrospectives and how to maximise their value.
Aino has appeared on the conference circuit since 2001 and has presented across the world. If you want to see Aino talking about retrospectives and being funny then she’ll be giving another keynote at GOTO Amsterdam 2020 on the 8th-11th June (pending current global circumstances).
I hope you enjoy the show and if you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at: [email protected].
Enjoy,
Toby
About Aino
Aino Vonge Corry is a teacher, a technical conference editor and retrospectives facilitator. She holds a masters degree and a ph.d. in computer science. She has 12 years of experience with Patterns in Software Development, and 10+ years’ experience with facilitation of retrospectives.
For the past 5 years she has been focused on facilitating the agile journey for several companies in Denmark. She also teaches how to teach Computer Science to teachers, and thus lives up to the name of her company; Metadeveloper.
In her spare time, she runs and sings (but not at the same time).
Aino’s book (UK):Anitpatterns for Retrospectives (Link is to Smile.Amazon.Co.Uk which means that a small portion is donated by Amazon to a charity you choose. This doesn’t impact the price and the author still gets their percentage. If you don’t want to donate to charity by purchasing, you can click on this link instead).
Allan Kelly was an early exponent of the #NoProjects movement, one of whose key tenets is:
“If you want to start a project, you’ve already failed”
Allan runs workshops on fresh thinking (thought leadership) and Agile team trainings He is also an Agile coach, speaks at conferences and events and spends a great deal of time at ‘Agile on the beach’.
Somewhere in amongst all of this, Allan finds the time to write some excellent books such as:
Project Myopia
Continuous Digital
The Little Book of User Stories FAQ
(links below)
This episode may appear to tilt toward the software and digital spaces, but regular listeners will be aware that here at Wicked Problems I encourage listeners who are involved in other fields to think about how the concepts being discussed might also be applied to help them too, as many of these concepts cross pollinate.
Remember – a Wicked Problem is, amongst other things, a problem with no obvious stopping condition.
Lastly – can you spot where the technical glitch in recording this episode took place? (We did our best to smooth over it!)
I hope you enjoy the show. If you have any comments or suggestions please write to me at:
Allan Kelly helps software development and other digital delivery teams to effectively deliver products using agile approaches.
He provides inspiring Agile training to teams and advice for leaders. He works across technology and business teams, both being part of the solution; something he calls call #BizTech. He was an early, and vigorous, exponent of the #NoProjects movement.
Work Death! From Kaizen to Karoshi with John Clapham
In this episode I talk to John Clapham, a professional coach and Agile consultant who works predominantly with I.T and digital services organisations.
John helps leaders and individuals develop, teams to build great products, and organisations learn to be more effective, productive and enjoyable to work in. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences around the UK.
With the advent of cloud technology and fast paced Agile project delivery methodologies such as Scrum & Kanban, come concepts such as Kaisen.
In Japanese, Kaisen merely gives us the principle of change for the better or an improvement, be that one-off or continuous.
In the world of Agile and lead methodologies it has been adopted as a word for continuous improvement, itself often used merely as a synonym for working at pace.
However, no one can work at pace all the time and it is perhaps perilous to forget that burnout does not lead to improvement but rather a reduction in productivity. Here we might do well to keep another Japanese term, Karoshi, in mind. Translated as ‘overwork death’, Karoshi is a term that refers to occupational sudden mortality.
This is not to suggest that the Japanese are working their population to death, but simply that in learning to work at pace we should ensure we don’t overwork our teams to their death.
In this episode John and I explore this concept with questions such as “how to deliver at pace whilst maintaining a healthy work life balance.”
Enjoy.
About John
John Clapham is an independent Agile consultant and professional coach. He helps individuals develop, teams build great products, and organisations learn to be more effective, productive and enjoyable to work in. His broad experience ranges from start-up to enterprise scale, formed in the publishing, telecommunications, commerce, defence and public sector arenas.
John is also often asked to talk at conferences and says “Nothing focuses the mind, or encourages thorough research like presenting ideas in front of hundreds of experts in the field.”
John has a secret passion for DevOps and Continuous Delivery. His forays into coaching, lean and Agile are fuelled by coffee, lego and Bristol’s frequent inclement weather.
This week I am talking to the CEO of ChaosIQ Russ Miles, cofounder of the open source project ChaosToolkit. Russ is also an international speaker, trainer and author.
Russ has just released his latest book title Learning Chaos Engineering: Discovering and Overcoming System Weaknesses Through Experimentation.
If you’ve ever experienced an issue with a computer system and wondered how it is that people don’t catch these issues, or if you are the owner of a system and have encountered an issue with it and thought: “I wonder why people don’t catch these during testing?” Then this episode is a must listen.
In fact, as you will hear, the tools to overcoming weaknesses and systems don’t just apply to computer systems but actually to any systems, including those that have no computers at all.
So grab a seat, sit back, listen and enjoy! And as you listen, I encourage you to think about how you might apply the techniques that Russ discusses to your own situation, whatever sphere that might be.
Billy Bragg’s music is heavily centred on bringing about change and involving the younger generation in activist causes . He is known to have said:
“I don’t mind being being labelled as a political songwriter. The thing that troubles me is being dismissed as a political songwriter.”
“Phil Collins might write a song about the homeless but if he doesn’t have the action to go with it he’s just exploiting that for a subject.”
Billy bought himself out of the British Army in 1981 for £175, cites his influences as The Clash, Bob Dylan, The Faces, The Small Faces & Simon & Garfunkel.
In 2018 Billy delivered a flagship speech at the Bank of England and he has recently released a new book entitled The Three Dimensions of Freedom.
