News
September 2023: Our trainers have returned to Greece, this time to the city of Thessaloniki, to deliver Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO1) training to the Greek arm of a well know retailer.
March 2023: The meetup group is in full swing again and its great to see all of the people attending the in-person get togethers. This month we joined forces with Tech-on-the-Tyne and held a joint meetup at the offices of Credera where Priyanka Baranwal and Osanda Gunasena talked about future developments in automation - Automating DevOps, what's next? There was a fantastic turnout with around seventy attendees. Now on with organising the next one…..
October 2022: DevOps North East continues to thrive - a great meetup group for people in and around the North East of England interest in DevOps, agile and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). For the October 2022 meetup we were joined again by one of our advocates Tom Hoyland who talked about metaphors, monitoring and metrics and how they can help to deal with complexity, overcome delivery challenges and find new and innovate ways of scaling agile and DevOps across your organisation.
September 2022: DevOps North East is 7 (seven) - yes, seven years old. From humble beginning with a just handful of people at Campus North to a grand tour of the biggest and best companies across the North East of England with sometimes in excess of 100 people, it has been quite a journey, learning some amazing stuff and making great friends along the way. The September meetup, a DevOps review, was us getting back to in-person meet-ups, a much better feeling all round.
August 2022: Our training provision is, and remains, a truly global offering. We partner with training providers (and deliver courses directly to) clients all over the world. This month one of our trainers were in Athens to deliver two practical agile courses. We obviously couldn't wait to share a photo from such a historic location.
June 2022: We continue to expand our training portfolio - we are called Creative Agile Partners because we Partner with leading organisations to augment their capacity, be it for training development and delivery, coaching or getting hands-on with delivery - our partnership model has proven to work time and time again. This month we have have started to partner Wiley Edge (formerly MThree) to roll out their global SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) programme. If you have an interest in adopting SRE in your organisation then contact us for coaching, training and delivery support.
April 2022: As a recognised DevOps Ambassador (by none other than the DevOps Institute) "Advancing the Humans of DevOps" we have started a mentoring programme for individuals in and around the DevOps sector who want the kind of support that their own organisation may not be able to give them. So far we have mentored (or "buddied") four individuals - if you would like to find out more please get in touch.
May 2022: Our consulting relationship with the Skipton Building Society goes from strength-to-strength. We have supported the society on their agile transformation since the beginning of 2020, pre, during, and post pandemic and their business model has been changed out of all recognition. Their success in the mortgage, savings and financial advice markets is powered by their agile value streams. More recently our team of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) coaches have been helping the exec and leadership team prioritise an ever growing - but successful - range of change and run initiatives. When adopting agile at scale the challenges of managing the portfolio are often the hardest to overcome. Please contact us if you want our help overcoming those challenges.
January 2022: The first DevOps North East meetup for 2022 focussed on "Azure DevOps" and how it combines Agile & DevOps capabilities to deliver continuously.
December 2021: DevOps North East Christmas party celebrating six years of DevOps North East!
July 2021: Our public sector practice continues to add more clients. This month we won a contract to help build a world class software engineering team at Homes England. Combining thought leadership and delivery execution, with our proven recruitment model, we shall create the digital team of the future for the UK Governments housing accelerator.
June 2021: As summer eventually arrives in the UK we began working with Dell to introduce Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in partnership with GuruTeam Ireland. Using a blend of DevOps and SRE content from our other partner DevOps Institute we created a training and coaching program to help Dell in their journey to cloud.
April 2021: We have been chairing an SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) track at the global DevOps Online Summit 2021 with conversations on a range of topics including:
- "What does losing weight and getting fit have in common with SRE?" with Abrar Hashmi of Agile Brains
- "Action! Making SRE happen – How fast, and what do we break along the way?" with Avinash Rao of Wipro
- "SRE implementing DevOps" with Nataliya Remez of Zettle
- "Kick Starting your SRE Journey – Experience Sharing" with Suresh GP of TaUB Solutions
April 2021:"It's Complicated" – DevOps North East this month focussed on Complexity Theory, Forecasting and the Nature of Work with Tom Hoyland of Sky Betting and Gaming. It was revealing to see Cynefin used in DevOps in such a novel and inventive way.
March 2021: The March 2021 DevOps North East event focussed on flow and the year flowing into spring time….. more pertinently we looked at DevOps Pipelines in Azure and how to use code to make them flow effectively.
February 2021: Remote training delivery continues to be the norm and this month, amongst others, our trainers delivered the DevOps Institute DevOps Foundation course to participants in Ireland via our partnership with Guru Team.
November 2020: This month we signed a deal to deliver BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) support to the software development ambitions of A. P. Moller - Maersk. Through a combination of training and coaching we worked together to tighten the feedback loop between Maersk business leaders and the software development teams.
October 2020: To bring colleagues who have been working from home together we have used a range of venues to have (socially distant) meetings. This month we used the fantastic Gilbert and Smiths, a venue trying their best to succeed under difficult circumstances.
September 2020: Great virtual networking event from Dynamo North East tonight using Remo as the platform. Some great conversation with Dynamo members around virtual tables.
August 2020: Our online agile courses continue to be well received. The clever use of whiteboard tools like Miro enable us to keep things interactive and fun, a key part of any agile session. We delivered a session this month to those working in NHS Digital.
July 2020: A further SRE v DevOps round table event took place this month hosted by the ITSM Academy Our founder was invited to provider their views, which were very well received.
April 2020: We were very kindly invited to participate in a panel discussion hosted by BrightTalk this month on the topic of "DevOps and SRE: Friend or Foe" - some fantastic discussion and probing questions.
April 2020: Training delivery is more and more remote due to the virus pandemic and this week we delivered a course in Behaviour Driven Development for NobleProg, a key training partner, to an end client based in Malta. As well as discussing the virus impact in the different countries we also explore the Gherkin syntax…. Given
March 2020: The COVID virus struck! As well as agile coaching we are now also offering remote working coaching for all of those now asked to work from home…. Get in touch to find out more.
March 2020: We delivered another Scrum Master course for our client BPDTS Limited, great feedback as always. See our training page for more details of upcoming courses.
February 2020: Our training reach grows ever more global, with the preparation and delivery of a custom agile, cloud and DevOps course for the Middle-East market (Practical Agile & DevOps in the Cloud) delivered by our trainer in Amman, Jordan.
February 2020: Exciting times in North Yorkshire this month as Creative Agile have been commissioned to help the Skipton Building Society on their agile transformation journey. Starting with agile delivery “hubs” focussed on Mortgage improvements and Savings improvements we have worked together to create the right physical environment, introduced agile coaching, and embraced a range of DevOps topics that will allow digital delivery to flourish.
February 2020: Scrum on the Tyne is all mine all mine, Scrum on the Tyne is all mine….. For those of a certain age they may recall a song by Lindisfarne (and afterwards covered by a certain Paul Gascoine) and this is what we were singing when delivering a Scrum Master course for BPDTS, the digital supplier to DWP, in Newcastle this month. As for all of our training the feedback was hugely positive so see our training page for more details of upcoming courses.
February 2020: The February DevOps North East Meetup was titled "Serverless, or Not Serverless, that is the question…." and involved a talk on AWS Serverless from Grid Smarter Cities and a talk on putting legacy servers into the cloud from BPDTS Limited. Little did we realise that this would be the last meetup of 2020!!!
January 2020: Our partnership with Noble Prog continues to develop and this month we conducted our first "remote" Scrum training course, the Scrum for Managers & Executives course. Delivering agile training is a very interactive experience and doing this remotely can sometimes be a challenge. However, the creative use of the Zoom platform, effective audience engagement, the help of the online white-boards/post-it note platform Jamboard from Google, helped recreate the feeling of an interactive and immersive training course. Here's some feedback from a delegate:
What did you like the most about the training?
The trainer had tailored the focus to best suit the needs of the audience and continually analysed the delegate comments / questions adding in extra content to make the training as effective as it could be. From this there quickly developed a strong rapport between trainer and delegates which created a very engaging atmosphere (no easy feat considering the training was remote!) and willing participation in the interactive elements. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and learnt a huge amount.
January 2020: Our first Meetup of the new decade involved a talk on Kubernetes and the use of Rainbows to colour code "on-demand" environments.
December 2019: Happy Xmas!
December 2019: Another Accenture DevOps Academy session this time amongst the Christmas markets in Frankfurt.
December 2019: The work we have been doing to curate a foundation-level Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) training course for the DevOps Institute went public this week with a "train the trainer" session with other DoI Registered Education Partners the output from which can be found here. We look forward to delivering this, and the other DoI training courses, in 2020 and beyond…..
November 2019: We resurrected our partnership with Sky Betting & Gaming by providing a Head of Delivery for their DevOps & Platform Tribe to cover them through a period of staff turnover.
November 2019: Another Accenture DevOps Academy session this month we have been back in Madrid. At the same time we took in some time to visit the Wanda Metropolitano stadium.
October 2019: For the October DevOps North East Meetup we visited the Sunderland offices of BGL Group, better known for their comparethemarket.com brand. Talks this month covered using Docker containers for .Net applications and the AWS CDK - cloud development kit.
September 2019: Sage UK have agreed to become a headline sponsor for the DevOps North East Meetup group. Their support will help cover the costs of the Meetup.com website hosting. They also kindly offered to host the September Meetup at their offices where we talked about "DevOps & SRE - what is the difference?"
September 2019: Our time with DWP Digital (BPDTS) is now drawing to an end. The challenge to cultivate and develop a DevOps/SRE practice of over 50 practitioners has proven very successful. A lot of advertising, interviewing, testing and on boarding has taken its toll and has consumed Creative Agile and its partners for some time - apologies for the newsfeed going quiet but clients must come first!
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February 2017: Deep technical dive at the February 2017 edition of the DevOps North East meetup group, with a look at Cloudformation from Amazon and Terraform from Hashicorp. We are at Campus North the third Thursday of each month and we are always on the lookout for speakers.
January 2017: Scaled Agile is our first theme in 2017, working with one of our partners, Alani Consulting Inc., to deliver a tailored Scaled Agile (Scaled Agile Framework/SAFe) transformation at one of the Nordic's largest banks. If you want a feeling for what it is like operating agile "at scale" then look at the dependency board below! Agile delivers across 4 countries, 8 value streams and release trains, 50 teams….
December 2016: Happy Xmas!
November 2016: The DevOps North East meetup group had its 1st Birthday this month and and SkyBet Italia kindly supplied a number of their "DevHops" beers, which were gratefully received. The talks focussed on Docker Swarm.
November 2016: Our DevOps training "road show" continues and this month we have been back in Madrid.
October 2016: Our "back-to-school" programme of events at the DevOps North East meetup continued this month with an introduction to "Infrastructure as Code". The event, held each month at Campus North was a great success with those starting out on their DevOps journey.
September 2016: Our Agile and DevOps experience in the on-line gaming sector has gained us recognition and the award of a new contract with a leading provider looking to launch into international markets. Skybet have launched its new International team at the Electric Works office in the centre of Sheffield. Our work with SkyBet Italia is to help them launch new & innovative betting and gaming products into the Italian market.
August 2016: And this is our annual holiday snap for 2016.
July 2016: A must for anyone operating in the Enterprise/DevOps space (something that Creative Agile do a lot) the DevOps Enterprise Summit took place in London this month. With keynotes from Gene Kim (author of the Phoenix Project), Ron van Kemenade (whom we worked with at ING Bank), amongst others, the Summit was hugely important to show that DevOps IS possible in the Enterprise world.
June 2016: For June 16 the DevOps North East meetup event returned to Campus North, a great venue supporting start-up's in the North East of England, and started with a light-hearted game of "Who wants to be a DevOps Millionaire" subsequently followed by a talk from the guys at Inframon exploring more about DevOps on Microsoft.
June 2016: Another location on our DevOps Academy training tour this month was the city of Paris. DevOps is a relatively new phenomenon in France so a lot of the concepts covered were a revelation for those present. We will run more training sessions in Paris in the future but if you would like to arrange a session now see our Training page.
June 2016: Our work with Virgin Money continues to bear fruit. This month featured the launch of their new Intermediary Portal. This portal, built using Agile techniques and deployed onto a Cloud-platform, a first for this bank, was launched following successful pilot. The portal is available at https://www.virginmoneyintermediaryportal.com and provides a rich web-based experience for Mortgage brokers.
May 2016: Our DevOps North East meetup event for May 2016 was on "Windows DevOps" which was new and unfamiliar ground for most attendees. Microsoft can never be ignored so it was fascinating to find out more about DevOps in Windows-land.
May 2016: Our Accenture DevOps Academy training tour continued this month with back-to-back courses in London. For more details on our DevOps training, see our Training page.
April 2016: The DevOps North East meetup this month was on "Visualising your Service - Beyond the black box" and "Whipping your WIP". Sponsorship and support from Equal Experts was welcomed.
April 2016: The annual Directors Dinner for the Dynamo North East technology community took place this month with a presentation from Graham Wylie on the history of Sage particularly capturing everyones attention (his anecdotes about this years US Masters Golf tournament went down a storm!)
April 2016: This month we are running the Accenture DevOps Academy in Madrid, the capital of Spain.
March 2016: The DevOps North East meetup this month focussed on "Lean thinking" and how it influences DevOps, as well as "Orchestration" with an overview of Docker Swarm.
March 2016: This month we are running the Accenture DevOps Academy in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Another successful session was ran with a lot of positive feedback. Of more interest, here are some snaps of Helsinki:
February 2016: Our banking sector expertise continues with the addition of a FTSE-250 bank to our client portfolio. We are now trusted to introduce Agile and DevOps through a "lab" concept to this household name bank.
January 2016: We are now running the DevOps North East (D.O.N.E.) meetup group, a regular gathering of those people (technical and business) with an interest in all things DevOps from in and around the North-East of England (Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham, etc). The January 2016 meetup was at the offices of Bede Group, a leading developer of gaming software, and covered "Getting started with DevOps" and "Measuring DevOps success".
December 2015: Our training expertise is now trusted by Accenture and we now help run the "Accenture DevOps Academy". We work with so many people from different Accenture offices and different projects across the world and share our knowledge and experience as part of a two day interactive training course. For more details on our DevOps training, see our Training page.
November 2015: Docker seems to be taking over the world! As the pre-eminent container technology, still only a two and a half-year old company, we thought it wise to attend Docker Con 2015, the conference for Docker users. Suffice to say it was amazing. The way in which Docker can package up ("containerize") your deployment needs and scale them to meet your demand. Docker as a technology will feature more and more in our approach to DevOps strategy and consulting, as well as being an integral part of our training offer.
September 2015: Our portfolio of enterprise clients continues to grow with recent DevOps projects taking us to a London-based FTSE-100 company looking to exploit DevOps across their global enterprise. Through a combination of Version Control, Automated Deployment, the Cloud and Agile we have transformed the global IT delivery capability of this prestigious organisation.
August 2015: Its the time of the year for a holiday, a time to recharge and refocus. Each year a team member will send in one of their favourite holiday snaps and we will show it here. This is this year's entry (can you guess where it is?):
July 2015: The DevOps Institute are running a range of courses that allow individuals to become DevOps Certified. We have been working with strategic partner and REP (registered education provider) Ranger4 to deliver a fun and engaging mixture of DevOps theory, and real world practice, to help attendees succeed in their training. For more details on our DevOps training, see our Training page.
June 2015: The inaugural Creative Agile golf day took place this month at Whickham Golf Club, a course with which we have a long association and where we are proud to sponsor a very tricky par 3 hole. Golfing enthusiasts from across our client base came together to enjoy a mixture of fourballs, despite the damp conditions.
May 2015: Another new client has partnered with us this month over in the Netherlands. We are working with a major Dutch Investment Bank on their "continuous delivery" agenda. By providing experienced CD Coaches we are helping with the delivery of "version controlled production assets", "continuous testing/test automation" and "deployment automation", amongst a range of other corporate CD items.
April 2015: We attended the Scrum Coaching Retreat taking place in Pattaya, Thailand, this month and spent some quality time with the best Agile coaches in the world. A fantastic venue provided the backdrop to some interesting and challenging discussions on the role of the Agile coach in an organisations transformation.
March 2015: The North East of England is gaining an international reputation for Digital and IT and to support this growth we have joined Dynamo North East. As members of this prestigous organisations we help employ, train and develop the very best local talent to help "grow the North East IT economy".
February 2015: Working with our strategic partner Ranger 4 ("DevOpsTastic!") we have worked with a number of major enterprises this month to help "lift-off" their DevOps journey. This approach to "boot strapping" the Development and Operations teams is thoroughly recommended.
January 2015: The signing of a new major client has taken some of our staff out to Sweden. Here we are helping a major retailer with their digital e-commerce improvement by using CA's DevOps toolset. Whilst not endorsing any particular technology vendor or stack, the CA Service Virtualisation tools certainly provide real value to development teams wholly dependent on (often legacy) "back-end" systems.
December 2014: Our founder is now a Certified Scrum Professional - one of only a small handful operating in the UK. If you want Agile and Scrum coaching or support from the best in the business then please get in touch.
November 2014: Our contribution to the Agile community continues apace. We invest heavily in the Agile North East community gathering and have this month gave a presentation on Agile + DevOps = Continuous Delivery on Steroids!!!
October 2014: Application Performance Management is something that is at the heart of a living, breathing, infrastructure eco-system. We have used agility to introduce this kind of tool to a couple of clients in this calendar year, with a focus on the App Dynamics product range. This has allowed our clients to pre-empt failure in their infrastructure and deal with it as part of a sprint-based Scrum approach. Our approach to any tooling rollout is to follow our heart - Agile and Scrum - and incrementally build value adding features with the tool.
September 2014: We do a lot of fun retrospectives with our clients, as part of their ongoing Scrum journey, and we've pulled together (and blogged about here and here) some of our best ones. In our eyes the retrospective is both a way to improve the way a team is operating (the "how", not the "what") and a chance for the team to dis-engage, relax, speak freely, and truly bond as a team.
August 2014: Our most recent speaking engagement took us to the Velocity conference in Beijing. We have earmarked China as a market that is ripe for DevOps, SCRUM and Continuous Delivery, with the pre-eminence (and IPO's) of some major digital players coupled with a massive start up community countered by the recognised challenges in moving China into the cloud. Our work on profiling continuous delivery within organisations in the UK and Europe certainly received some attention with over 40 people in attendance at our session.
July 2014: This month we have helped a client with their challenges embracing MongoDB in a continuous delivery pipeline. Mongo is a fantastic NoSQL "database" with unparalleled flexibility and performance when underpinning new age digital infrastructures. However there are some challenges when embracing continuous delivery and multiple daily deployments to production - data persistence across deployments in a continuously delivered live environment is both a headache and an opportunity and we have worked to assist the client build the technical and managerial capacity to make it happen.
June 2014: Our annual charity challenge for 2014 is "Joppa for Jo", which will take place at the end of June. A group of MAMIL's (middle-aged men in lycra!), including our very own founder, will be cycling from Newcastle to Edinburgh, 210 miles across 3 days, following the "coasts and castles" route" in memory of Jo O'Hara, and helping Cancer Research UK. To support this worthy cause see the fundraising page.
May 2014: Careers update. Our drive to recruit Developers with Scala skills and Testers with Selenium skills is gathering pace. If you have skills in either of these areas and are looking for a fresh challeng, get in touch via our Careers page.
April 2014: This month featured another guest speaker appearance for Ranger 4 this time on their webcast about using Agile with DevOps. Both are modern trends in software and service development and the webcast goes on to explain how organisations can get the best of both worlds by building a continuous delivery capability, using DevOps, but in small, incremental bursts of development using Agile.
March 2014: Our founder was a DevOps specialist guest speaker for Ranger 4 this month on their webcast about the DevOps Maturity Assessment (DMA) process. The assessment is used to benchmark organisations and provide a baseline for their ability to adopt DevOps and Continuous Delivery. The resulting index is based on cultural, process, organisation and tooling factors and can be used to identify areas for improvement (and measure progress towards that improvement).
February 2014: Old dog, new tricks.... This month we have been working with a client operating in the financial services market who depend heavily on IBM iSeries (was AS400) processing capability. Not unsurprisingly the "big boys" (IBM, HP, CA, etc.) have invested heavily (either by acquisition or by R&D) in the DevOps and Continuous Delivery space and it was good to work with experts from IBM to compile a DevOps strategy and architecture for this client. The Rational toolset was pivotal in lining up the business with development and operations and introducing automation, and Urbancode was a fundamental plan in enabling continuous delivery/deployment. No matter what your platform, we have a DevOps story for you.
January 2014: DevOps days are becoming commonplace around the world, reflecting the grass roots basis of the movement which is now being increasingly strategic in large corporations. This month we've been to Leeds DevOps, where some good beer was shared with some good discussion around DevOps.
December 2013: As part of our on-going focus on the end-to-end value chain of Continuous Delivery our consultants have been working with automated deployment tools (such as the DeployIT tool, available from Xebia Labs, and the Rapid Deploy tool, available from Midvision) on cloud providers (both Amazon Web Services and SkyTap) to prove how they can streamline the processes of continuous cloud deployment. To retain our objectivity we do not go in for partnership agreements with vendors. Realising the value chain of continuous delivery within organizations (concept-to-cash) is often about removing constraints - and a combination of these (and other) tools and providers ensure that getting solutions into the cloud need not be a headache.
November 2013: Our team attended DevOps Day London on 11th and 12th November, 2013, an event that was absolutely jam packed, highlighting the growing nature of the DevOps movement. A particular highlight was the keynot from Mark Burgess, founder of CF-Engine, on the science behind infrastructure automation. Puppet Labs, the automation software provider, were also in attendance from "across the pond" (they also ran Puppet Camp London 2013) focussing on the growing importance of London as a worldwide DevOps hub.
October 2013: The VMworld 2013 show in Barcelona this year was "fantastico". In particular the VMware network virtualization technology , NSX, looked awesome. The massive administrative challenges that face large web-scale organizations can be abstracted using generic configurations and this can be applied to fast moving network topologies.
September 2013: We have now rolled-out Agile/SCRUM processes to 500 people (and counting) across the many organisations we have worked with. We still sometimes advise teams to use manual systems for this, however both Jira and TFS 2012 ALM, are enabling technologies we have used.
August 2013: We are at Puppet Conf 2013, in San Francisco, listening to some great keynote speeches and getting some “deep drive” training from one of the industry leaders in infrastructure automation.
July 2013: To demystify some of the concepts and buzzwords we use, but take for granted, we have now posted some links to Wikipedia. DevOps, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS should now be fully explained.
Creative Agile - "Enabling Continuous Delivery"
