by Rodney Gedda

Telstra CIO seeks Agile skills for change program

News
May 30, 20112 mins
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The CIO of Telstra has taken the unusual step of personally writing a job ad. Patrick Eltridge wants to hire experienced Agile process coaches for a change program he sees as exciting and rewarding.

Eltridge was appointed CIO at the telco in October last year and took over the position from John McInerney who left three months earlier.

In a job ad posted to the Whirlpool broadband forum, Eltridge talked up Telstra as “the single most important” company in Australia and “that is why I joined”.

“We are leaders in technology. Our programs are on a much larger scale than most, using cutting edge technology,” he wrote. “Join IT at Telstra and you will have exposure to some of the most exciting initiatives in the IT industry such as cloud and virtualisation, not to mention one of the most ambitious adoptions of agile practises [sic] in any organisation.”

To facilitate these Agile practices, Eltridge is looking for experienced Agile process coaches as part of a large-scale change program.

Agile coaches at Telstra are responsible for providing Agile guidance, education and team facilitation to build sustainable capability across the whole IT team and advance “delivery excellence” goals.

Read more about Telstra’s Agile journey in Time to get Agile.

Skills sought include knowledge and exposure to the Agile and Waterfall methodology and a “demonstrated capability to deliver IT Infrastructure designs within a complex IT environment”.

Telstra also named its vendor partners for internal IT, including IBM, Accenture, Fujitsu, Frontline, Oracle, EMC, NetApp.

The internal operations consists of five areas: firewall, architecture, networks, finance and IT operations.

Working with the iteration manager, other duties include managing blockers, identifying common issues encountered by the project teams and help create a collaborative culture.

According to Eltridge, without extraordinary people Telstra can’t achieve great success.

“[Telstra] will give you a professional experience to be proud of,” he wrote.

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