Prologue
Hi, my name is Tim Simpson. I’m a Senior Solution Architect within the Architecture Practice at Capgemini UK working mainly on the HMRC account which is Capgemini’s largest UK account.
I’ve worked on the account for many years and am currently assigned to the Digital Delivery Group (DDG) which has over 800 people in offices at multiple locations across the UK. It’s a very busy and exciting place to work!
The DDG works concurrently on many projects for many different customers (not just HMRC) both in the Public and Private sectors. We and our customers use virtually every tool, technology and technique you can think of somewhere along the way. Almost all of the projects we undertake are agile projects which may vary in duration from weeks, often months to sometimes years. The projects are almost always challenging whether that be due to complexity, scale, timescales, risk or all of these.
I’m still convinced (after 3 decades in the IT industry including some time running my own software company) that Architecture is the best discipline if you want to see every aspect of the development life cycle. It’s a “go anywhere” pass!
I’m also convinced that “building products” is way easier than “doing projects” (although both are great fun). I’ve never seen much forgiveness in the aggressive “fixed price, fixed functionality and fixed deadline world of projects” where you never get to do the same project twice. (Agile didn’t change much of that in the “large projects” world.)
I’m a reluctant blogger but several colleagues encouraged me to share the journey for the role I was offered and took up over a year ago to spend 50% of my time as the “DDG Capabilities Lead”.
The Capabilities Lead role basically involves driving the people within the DDG (all 750+ of them) to continually enhance and learn new skills as well as share their knowledge so that as a business we can embrace the ever-changing demands of our customers and win new business in emerging markets whilst remaining highly capable and competitive.
So how exactly do you go about doing that?! Where on earth do you start?!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The biggest problem for me is the problem that the IT industry has always faced, namely “The Continuous Learning Dilemma”. (More to follow on that in the next post.)
Fortunately, I work with some really clever people who are never short of advice (or opinions) and because Capgemini employs over 230,000 (and growing!) people across the globe I’m not alone in attacking this problem. There’s also a host of business partners to call upon.
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
29th March, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini