Biography

While he doesn’t look it, Rick has been working in IT & associated projects for over thirty years, half of which has been for Zurich Insurance. Having started out in mainframes he moved through PC applications & support into projects, programs & portfolio management. After years of tradition IT Project Management, he moved into global project delivery assurance role ensuring large, complex projects were delivering their promised benefit. As certain issues kept repeating themselves within these projects, his role changed to lead the organisation in embracing the Agile Scrum methodology. As this matured, it grew to encompass DevOps, both from a technical and organisational perspective, evaluating how and where this technological shift could and should be incorporated. The challenge with this being, as with many large, historic, complex companies, there are many large, historic, complex applications too.

Talk

Unicorns and Elephants - Establishing DevOps in an Established Environment

DevOps is clearly the way forward for every organisation using software to sail the turbulent waters of 21st century. Where that organisation is relatively new, this approach is natural. Where an organisation has mainframes, running cobol systems that have been central to it’s services for decades, the problem is different. This session will explore how an established global insurance company have approached the introduction of DevOps tools and methodology within a complex technical environment.

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