Maury Richards

Maury Richards

I am focused on enabling business through technology. I want to allow my business colleagues to be as efficient and effective as possible and I have a vision for how technology and automation can allow them to achieve this. I am dedicated to quality and continual improvement of myself and those I lead and work with and of the technical solutions I build. I believe in management through facilitation and mentorship.

I started my career as a software developer working for a large software development company in the audio and video post production industry.  At this organization we made the transition to Agile/Scrum in 2002/2003.  The satellite office that I worked at in Edmonton took to the methodology with open arms as we were already working in iterative, bite-sized pieces of functionality and Scrum seemed to provide us with the formal framework to continue to work the way we always had.  The team here did everything we could to apply as much Agile teachings to our work that we could and also did as much as we could to mentor other business units in the organization through leading by example.

From here I moved on to be an integration team lead for the IT department of crown corporation with the Alberta government.  I was hired primarily because of my Scrum and technical background to build a strong team and assist the organization in an Agile transformation.  Over my tenure there we transformed the 60+ person internal development group from using waterfall to being a fully functioning Scrum shop.  We achieved a number of significant victories by demonstrating to our business stakeholder the value of transparency and iterative work.  During this time I worked as a Solutions Archtitect and Scrum Master on a number of projects.  It was here that I learned how these two roles complement one another and could/should in fact be one.

Now I work for an industry leading company in the oil and gas industry.  I am working as a Solutions Architect and Scrum Master and in the first six months here have built strong relationships with my new business stakeholders.  I have taught them Scrum and hired a development team that is delivering them value through transparency and continuous improvement.  The feedback I have received from the customers is that they have never had as much fun and seen as much value delivered to them in an IT project.  Scrum wins again!