Kwaku Ampomah

I started off as a traditional manual functional tester and was lucky to come across agile scrum in the work place when I worked for Skinkers in 2006.  I was a changed man and became passionate about Agile Scrum. 

I then worked in a number of other places and agencies (Im a contractor) who 'pretended' to do scrum but had no clue whatsoever.  I believe this period de-skilled me off my scrum experience with Skinkers.

I was lucky once more to work with KPMG London Tax Technology team who adopted Agile Scrum for the whole team (including project managers, business analysts and senior managers.  It was great because the whole team was committed to using scrum and keeping as closely to the principles as possible.

It was a great learning and development environment and completely refuelled & reignited my passion for scrum. It was not devoid of teething problems and the usual challenges from Directors and Clients.  It was also not devoid of the one or two dissenters who were ready to give up when they thought that Agile Scrum wasn't working, but the Team stuck to its guns and persistently continues to work with Agile Scrum.

Mistakes have been made on the way continually.  Overestimation, underestimation, guesstimation - changes, interference, demands from 'The Business' - technical expertise, technical debt, the right scrum tools - using burndown charts, playing poker, show & tell..................quite often its all been a muddle but the team has constantly improved and is getting there, is 'getting it'. - Yes I was lucky to have had the opportunity of going through the transition with this team. A totally uber invaluable experience

My ambition now is to bacome an Agile Scrum guru and take it to Africa where IT and Software development is on fire and growing rapidly.

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