Daniel Carrilho - Our Spell Book Coach

Let’s imagine what the first day at Critical Techworks is like. A new office, dozens of new teammates and a fresh adventure about to start. One of the first interactions may well be with Daniel Carrilho, our Agile Gandalf, who will help with the quest for smooth integration into the company culture and, later on, with the challenge to improve all development skills and interactions in order to deliver the best products for the mobility/logistics of the future.

“I’m one of the first contacts for our new teammates and I do my best to help them learn the ropes of our corporate mindset and let them know what’s expected of all of us, and help us all add to our own and CTW’s intelligence.”

ONBOARDING When onboarding new colleagues, Agile Gandalf gives all he’s got to provide a great Scrum training session, and experience so that everybody can learn how to keep the focus on individuals and interactions and the continuous delivery of value with technical excellence. He also helps to clarify what Critical TechWorks intends to deliver to BMW in terms of interactions, communication and valuable end results.

SPOILER ALERT

Our mystical wizard doesn’t just cast magic spells, fight orcs and kill balrogs, he has other roles too.

He contributes on an organisational and team level in order to protect and help everybody to uncover better ways of developing an Agile mindset. He serves as an enterprise coach and also as a go-to Scrum Master.

Even though he works closely with the main teams and has a unique position at Critical TechWorks, Gandalf is no one’s boss.

“Everything I do is on behalf of the self-autonomy, self-empowerment and self-engagement of our people.

I have an impartial role. This is exactly what I want, and I do my best to keep it like that. And believe me, it’s not easy; I’m still human. I’m a teammate, a trainer and a coach, and I love to practise what I preach. That’s it.”

Unsurprisingly, due to his role, our Agile Gandalf is a proactive advocate of Agile Software Development values and principles and the Scrum Framework that we are continuously improving within the organisation through our own CTW Agile working model, values and culture.

As he says, “more than a mindset, much more, Agile at Critical TechWorks is a concrete creation and instantiation for uncovering better ways to develop software and to help others to do this. Customer satisfaction is our number one goal and we believe that to be able to achieve this, our own people satisfaction is just as important.�

Moreover, Daniel says that he also aims to minimise assumptions as much as possible, in order to make sure it’s intelligence and valuable information that lead decision-making.

“Machines are complicated but we, humans, are complex, very complex. Mostly, the source of the ‘bug’ is not in the software, but rather between the keyboard and the chair and I myself am certainly guilty of that.”

With over 25 years of experience in software development, our Agile Gandalf has dedicated his life to technology and people, and he found that his best trait was his ability to interact and communicate, always focused on delivering value, hence his current position at Critical TechWorks.

“Fight against the monsters out there, the ones that keep us from improving, the ones that make us think we already know everything and the demons that blind us from the fact that software development is made up of human interactions and has to be approached as an empirical process, transparently.�

“Thanks and take care.

Farewell."