Meet a Tech PM - John Nguyen

 John is an experienced technical PM in my team who has been delivering a high profile program of work that makes life easier for banking staff. Instead of rolling out a 'big bang' single outcome, John and his team have been consistently releasing new features over the past year using agile methods.

What was your first job in tech?

My first job in Technology was working for Datacraft as a Research and Design (R&D) Engineer, working on high speed data switch ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). My primary responsibility was to write the billing module software using a programming language called Fortran. The challenge with the role at the time was that the design requirements were to fit into a PCMCIA card of only 128MB.  

What do you enjoy most about working at ANZ?

PEOPLE - The thing I enjoy most about working at ANZ is that the company attracts a wonderful diverse range of talented people from a multitude of cultures. The current program I am working on is a real example of this. The team exude a strong collaborative approach. We feel more like a hard working family. There is a genuine care for each other and what we are trying to achieve together. We all aim to do our best and help one another toward achieving the projects goals. Our team is made up of Australian, Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Hungarian, Scottish and Vietnamese … just to name a few of our origins. I love it.

We’re constantly innovating in Digital projects. Tell us about a recent tech/way of working change that your team has implemented.

Over the past 2 years working on this program, the team had to adopt working across two methodologies, the traditional waterfall approach and the new agile way of working. There was a period of time where we needed to create a hybrid methodology that complimented the milestone needs of software deployment checkpoints that were still aligned to the rigidity of the waterfall approach, while immobilizing the areas we could influence to embrace an agile approach. There are still some Technology areas within ANZ that are in a state of suspended animation, with waterfall methodology entrenched. This however is slowly changing.

Within the BBD program we have really pushed the technology available using electronic dashboards for monitoring production & non production environment, driving one common JIRA projects across all technology partners, electronic dashboard for daily stand-up … etc. The new way of working(NWOW) is a welcomed initiative as it really aligns to and supports the practice that the BBD program has been executing over the past year.

How did the change affect your team?

The NWOW did not impact the program in fact the aligns well with how we work.

If you could be a social media platform or app, which one would it be and why?

Snap Chat – It encourages a quick highlight summary of what’s happening without saturating my timeline with non-impactful communications. I rarely receive anything mundane on snapchat. Its audio-visual brief stimulation that gives me enough to have me feel up to date and involved. Plus the filters that they develop can be super fun!

This Q&A is the first in a series. Stay tuned for the next one!