Biography
Chris Fortuin is a project manager and loves to deliver awesome software to his customers through team collaboration. During the first decade of his professional life he learned his project management and people skills as a management consultant for Ernst & Young in The Netherlands. Subsequently, a long aspired life-change brought him with his family to Australia where he continued delivering software solutions in large and complex organisations.
Throughout his career Agile was, and remains, his passion. It started more than ten years ago in Europe with DSDM and continues nowadays with great challenges of making Agile work with his customers using Scrum and XP practices. By providing industry presentations and customised training courses he is privileged to share his knowledge and experience in topics like project management, Agile software development and Earned Value Management.
Last but not least, his favourite hobby is to participate in triathlons and what better place to do this than in sub-tropical Queensland.
Work experience
Rio Tinto, Project Manager
March 2011 - January 2012, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
As Project Manager and ScrumMaster I was responsible for the development and rollout of automated service employee forms with system integration into SAP. With regular releases to production we rolled out forms and improvements based on feedback from users. The development team was co-located with analysts, designers, developers & testers collaborating with user representatives to develop the forms. Daily stand-ups, burn up/down charts and keeping the product fully engaged were standard practices. We ran fortnightly iterations and all project work was driven by stories. Planning, reviewing and retrospectives were performed using fortnightly iterations and conducted with the product owner and team.
All these practices were fully compliant with PRINCE2 and Scrum and combined with practices from DSDM and XP.
Because this was the first Agile project for Rio Tinto my other key responsibility was to provide ongoing coaching and education for the team, product owner and other project stakeholders.
Brisbane City Council, Project Manager
November 2009 - June 2010, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
As Project Manager, and in the role as ScrumMaster, I was responsible for the development and installation of DA Consoles to access electronic Development Applications (DA) at 26 ward offices throughout Brisbane. For the software development, hardware configuration and installation I used an Agile approach with Scrum practices like:
> Weekly iteration meetings with the complete team and product owner to review progress and plan work for the next iteration;
> Prioritising the product backlog with the product owner to ensure the rollout and installation at ward offices would commence on time and completed within budget;
> Incrementally delivering fully functioning installations at a central location in BCC to allow improvements based on user feedback and finalise the eDA Console before rolling out to local ward offices.