Passionate about IT

"Passion about IT and the people that use it" it says in my profile. What's that about?

5 years ago I first read the little book XP and SCRUM from the trenches from Henrik Kniberg. I was amazed at how much sense it made to me for reorganizing the workplace and the processes. As a non-developer at the time but working as the all-round IT guy for several developer teams I could still relate to the material. Immediately after reading the little book several times over I implemented a poor man's version of the SCRUM technique for our 2 man team. Using daily stand-ups to asses the workload and a one-week ahead SCRUM like white board (with planned, unplanned and done items) I wanted to see if this would give us more insight in our fighting fires level of IT support at the time. It worked much better than I ever expected and using the "stories" suddenly we were able to better define what needed to be done and what was waste. We got into talks with stakeholders about the value of requests and could more easily prioritize and plan ahead.

This sounds a bit like your typical "how SCRUM changed the workplace for the better" and I can surely relate to this. To me it also helped me to gain a respect and insight into the people that use IT and are somewhat mystified about the IT stuff that they have to use. IT is not easy to understand if your context is not the inner workings of IT but just a tool to accomplish a task. Since my first steps with SCRUM and Agile I frequently ask why a specific issue is important (story points!) to the user and let him/her tell about their passion for their work. It tells you so much more about a person and it also helps a lot to assess the issue at hand. Context is everything in most issues and a user's passion for their work is where context is created.

In conclusion: Being passionate about the people that use IT helps me help them

Thats why I love IT stuff and the people that (have) to use it.