Simplicity in the face of complexity, understanding in the face of confusion and communication in the face of noise
Deriving and prioritizing requirements, managing roadmaps and expectations
Motivating cross functional teams and giving them the tools and freedom to do their best work
Project management with just the right amount of formality to fit your business. Not too much, not too little.
A comprehensive background in testing and test management is a solid foundation for our other skills. Testing rocks.
Never evangelising, always pragmatic, and always understanding that agile is about delivery, not ceremony.
Hoinick is a husband and wife team owned and operated by Tom du Pré and Hanna Leivo. They both have lots of experience in making projects work by applying their numerous and varied skills with enthusiasm, skill and good humour. They are both highly capable in agile software development methodologies and have demonstrated time and again how to make these techniques work properly and productively. Also involved is their dog Bertie who is in charge of all matters concerning tennis balls and overseas business development activities
Tom du Pré is a business analyst, scrum master, product owner, test manager, you name it, he’ll do it. He’s got a very pragmatic idea of what it means to be “agile” and has recently put this to good use on projects for Weve, Sky and Associated Newspapers. He likes making stuff, fixing stuff and writing about stuff and he can never remember where he left his keys.
Hanna Leivo is a skilled scrum master, project manager and program manager with lots of experience of making things work at companies like the BBC, Sky and Dunnhumby. Her specialities include making teams work well together, and getting the right people talking to each other, even if I they think they don’t want to. She is kind to all animals, especially Bertie and likes walking in the woods and laughing at rude jokes.
Bertie plays a vital role in Hoinick by collecting any old tennis balls the company needs to operate. He’s also responsible for calculating our corporation tax liability and filing VAT remittances. Although he’s not skilled in agile activities (he’s actually rather clumsy) he’s very curious and interested in whatever you’re doing and is a fast learner as long as there’s a biscuit.
Product ownership of the site of one of the world’s biggest entertainment franchises with a fanatical audience. We owned the delivery of a beautiful new site backed by a killer content system, laden with unique content from J.K.R. In case you were wondering Tom is a Slytherin, Hanna is a Hufflepuff and so is Bertie.
We managed the delivery of the new BBC Three website, as part of the move from a TV channel to an online-0nly channel. We took the project from concept through to launch, and establishing it as a stable business as usual platform.
We helped Weve deliver a brand new mobile loyalty application called “Pouch” by providing business and technical analysis expertise, as well as managing the deliveries from a 3rd party development and test team.
We provided scrum mastering skills on BBC New’s content management system. Demonstrating once again how we can make agile actually deliver value. BBC News
Hoinick provided business and technical analysis expertise to Sky Go’s advertising project. This involved integrating a 3rd party ad server into Sky Go’s iOS, Android and XBox applications, and onto the Sky Go website. This turned Sky Go into a revenue generating product for the first time. Sky Go
We provided DMG Media (or A&N Media as it was then known) with our expertise about the “EU Cookie law”. We audited their proposed response to this law, and advised on changes they should make. We know all about this cookie law. We even wrote some blog posts about it. DMG Media
Hoinick provided expertise into numerous projects and departments at Sky. We provided scrum mastering skills on several sky.com websites, project managed several large customer experience changes, and provided analytical and consultancy expertise in helping Sky respond to new data privacy laws. Sky.com
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I hear a lot of testers telling each other that the testing activities they are doing “aren’t Agile”. So what is Agile testing? Turns out it’s testing, that’s done in an Agile way! Who’d have… Read more
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More posts about the cookie law…
I would be entirely sympathetic to anyone sending a letter similar to the one below to the ICO in response to a complaint about cookies. Dear DCMS and ICO. You gave us a delayed and loosely worded cookie law that missed the point of the wider privacy concerns completely. So if my response to… Read more
The good people at Silktide recently posted another of their entertaining blogs, this one entitled “Dear ICO: This Is Why Web Developers Hate You“. Silktide are the same people who made “The stupid EU cookie law in 2.5 minutes” and more recently “The stupid cookie law… Read more
I’ve spent a large part of the last year talking about cookies, writing about cookies, advising about cookies and avoiding cookie related puns wherever possible. Now that cookie day is upon us I thought I’d take a look back at the last year and see if we can learn anything about what… Read more
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Recruiting good people is a pain. There’s few things that feel as pointless as spending an hour interviewing someone who you know isn’t going to get the job, or trawling though a huge pile of innaporpriate CVs. Life is too short and your time is too precious to be inefficient when you are… Read more