David Hicks

I’m David Hicks, Agile Alliance Founder Member, consultant, trainer and coach. I have over 25 years experience of Agile, working on some of the largest and most complex implementations in the world.  In 2015, I was voted ‘Most Popular Scrum Professional’ in the prestigious annual Agile Awards which recognise outstanding contributions in the field.

I got into this line of work in 1987 through my Master's degree thesis on iterative development which was published by the British Computer Society. I started my career in the heyday of the waterfall as an analyst-programmer, team leader and ultimately project manager with a company called LBMS. LBMS were the originators of the PRINCE and SSADM structured methods. This was their main business .... but I was responsible for defining LBMS’s first iterative SDLC and worked with a lot of the early large 4GLs and client-server applications doing iterative development.

My career in Agile really took off in the early ’90s when I started to use DSDM and became a certified Practitioner and Trainer. As an independent consultant in 1997, I was hired by British Airways to manage the implementation of DSDM as the standard method across their 5,000-strong IT organisation. I managed this Programme for nearly four years and learned an awful lot about enterprise-Agile and organisational change. It also led me onto the Heathrow Terminal 5 project in 1998 which is where I first started using Scrum. A trip from Heathrow to a conference in 2001 is particularly memorable because I was asked by the organisers to give Ken Schwaber a lift in my car. I’d read his stuff but never met him before ... and, of course, by the time we arrived three hours later, I was totally converted!

I joined the Agile Alliance as a Founder member in 2002 and have been doing Agile consulting, training and coaching in a whole range of different contexts ever since, using the full range of Agile approaches including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP, DSDM, Agile Project Management and the Open/Agile Unified Process.

Outside work I live in the beautiful countryside of SW England. I’m married, have two daughters, and for R&R indulge my passion for collecting and racing Ducati motorcycles and well as enjoying day trips and summer weekends in a 1966 VW Split Screen Campervan.