Louise Elliott
Main focus: Agile Leadership
Twitter handle: @IvanaTerrorBull
Website/blog: ivanaterrorbull.wordpress.com
City: Leeds
Country: United Kingdom
Topics: agile, lean, kanban, agile management, software management, software leadership, leadership, agile delivery leadership, fintech, software development
Louise Elliott is a Software Development Manager in the finance industry. She has worked in the software world for around 25 years as developer, technical architect and manager. She has successfully introduced agile and lean to many companies and is a great believer in the benefits of self organising teams and she is an international speaker on leadership and management in software development.
Ivana the Terror Bull is Louise's Roller Derby name and she has skated with the Leeds Roller Dolls’ recreational league, the 'Wrecking Brawls', since 2013. She is as passionate about Roller Derby as she is about software quality.
Examples of previous talks / appearances:
What does human evolution teach us about how we should lead teams in the 21 st century? This talk takes a journey covering the last 2.5 million years from a hunter and gather lifestyle to the creation of agriculture and through to the industrial revolution, in order to understand the influences which still affect us today. It asks questions such as “Why are 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs so tall?” and “Can you tell a person’s job just by looking at their face?”. It also delves into the different strategies which chimpanzees use to become the alpha male and considers whether any of them would be useful in the human world.
This talk looks at:
- what we can learn from chimpanzee alpha males
- the unexpected influences which human evolution have on our choice of leaders
- why evolutionary influences cause problems in today’s work place
- the importance of followers rather than leaders
- how to give followers what they want
During April 2015 a top level management conference in a financial organisation identified the main problem which was facing them as a business. Even though they were relatively new to the world of Agile they decided to kick off a time limited piece of work to see what experts drawn from across the business could achieve within short timescales, when they had appropriate focus. So was born the 90 day challenge.
The challenge was large, not only because the organisation was new to Agile and tended to work in silos but also because the area to be addressed was very highly regulated. The problem was not directly software related and had deep involvement from the operational business area affected, marketing, products, compliance and legal departments. This talk looks at how the programme was run along with the difficulties it faced and the successes it achieved.
The talk is aimed at software development managers and higher level managers who are interested in the power of using Agile and Lean principles to address the main issue facing an organisation.
Roller Derby is an assertive team sport which is played on roller skates and requires large amounts of skill, agility and flexibility. This talk delves into the world of Roller Derby and what is necessary for team success. It uses Roller Derby to illustrate how behaviours we think are useful can sometimes get in the way of success. This leads to a discussion of patterns and anti patterns in Agile software development.
This talk is aimed at team members, anyone who manages software teams and also higher level managers who wish to understand more about how to deal with problems in agile adoption. It builds an understanding of what good looks like as well as a list of anti-patterns to
watch out for.