Julian Harris

Technical Account Manager and Agile Coach at Google

London, United Kingdom

Current
  • Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Agile Coach at Google
Past

see less...

5 more...

Education
  • University of Auckland
  • University of Auckland
  • University of Auckland
Recommended
Julian has 23 recommendations 23 people have recommended Julian
Connections
382 connections
Industry
Information Technology and Services
Websites

Julian Harris’s Summary

At Google I'm responsible for managing partner-specific technical implementations in EMEA. I'm also an agile instructor helping teams across the world in side Google take on agile principles.

In Conchango from 2006-2007 I specialised in strategy around, and delivery of Web 2.0 applications and social computing, with particular focus on UK Retail Financial Services. PRINCE2 Practitioner, Certified Scrum Master. Created and led Conchango's Web 2.0 community of excellence and led the charge on a number of major UK and European brands to shape their online strategy. Passionate advocate of Scrum and Agile methods, along with user-centred design principles and practices (I read alertbox and asktog regularly).

In 2003-2005 I successfully delivered UK's leading online protection solution (Friends Provident eSelect) to production and helped shape and evolve it over 4 phases. It won 11 industry awards for innovation and usability.

Computer science / software engineering / user experience / information architecture. Moved entirely to pure technical management / leadership back in 2001 lead teams of 20-30 across continents. I have deep experience with the ATG ebusiness framework and contracted with them in Spain on Spain's biggest ecommerce project to-date (with Telefonica). I love music; I'd kill to work for a music company writing some Cool New Tool that Does Neat Things With Sound. Do a search for 'shadow harp' to see an invention of mine / Zach's back in Barcelona.

Blog: http://www.julianonsoftware.com [15 Feb 09 -- sorely out of date, follow me instead on http://twitter.com/julianharris]

Julian Harris’s Specialties:

Agile coach, Agile software delivery, Agile project management, Certified Scrum Master, Java, user experience design, Web 2.0, Social Computing and how it impacts your business. Oh and a bit of Ruby on Rails. A bit.

Julian Harris’s Experience

  • Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Agile Coach

    Google

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; GOOG; Internet industry)

    January 2008 — Present (2 years )

    Responsible for working with Google partners in the EMEA region to ensure technical delivery and overall relationship well-being of partner-related initiatives, either in-bound (services and customisations needed by Google, from partner) or out-bound (services and customisations needed by partner, from Google). Also active inside Google's agile practices special interest group holding training courses.

  • Senior Agile Proj Mgr / Web 2.0 Solution Architect

    Conchango

    (Public Company; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

    August 2006 — December 2007 (1 year 5 months)

    Scrum Master aka Senior Agile Project Manager specialising in social computing (google for ''social computing guy') and web 2.0 with extensive experience with UK Financial Services Protection Products.

  • Technical Project Manager

    Practiv Applied Software Ltd

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Insurance industry)

    January 2003 — July 2006 (3 years 7 months)

    Successfully delivered UK's leading online protection solution (Friends Provident eSelect) to production in early 2003 and helped shape and evolve it over the subsequent 2 years. It has since won 11 awards.

    Then moved to a similar 'me too' project at BUPA but focused more on a mixture of technical, business project management with some ebusiness consulting as well.

  • Technical Project Manager

    ATG

    (Public Company; 201-500 employees; Telecommunications industry)

    March 2002 — November 2002 (9 months)

    ATG and Sun worked with Telefonica to build their PDSL platform in 2002. It was a pretty wizzy system which offered things like video game rental, videoconferencing, etc. The ATG team were sharp and I was able to contribute to the code base at one point to work with order processing and suchlike; but by and large my job was to help keep the project focused and on-track. It was chaotic; Telefonica aren't much fun to work with. Alan, Pat and Xavi rock and I wouldn't hesitate in working with any of them in future (hopefully they'll link up at some point)

  • 'Local CTO'

    IconMediaLab

    (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

    2001 — 2001 (less than a year)

    Swedish stock-exchange-listed IconMediaLab was almost 'pure product' of the Dot Com Boom. Flush with cash these guys rapidly grew to have 1800 people in 32 plush offices worldwide (their SF offices cost $US60k/month, $1m to set up and they committed to a 10 year lease). But there wasn't a lot of substance to their strategy and when times got rough, it imploded.

    So my stint in their Barcelona office was interesting. I certainly learnt a lot about how not to manage an office by the MD there, and some insight into what the CTO role involves. I wasn't really ready for that role to be honest; but it was the first step in my move away from 'pure tech' to a leadership track. I had a team of 16 people -- some of whom didn't speak English, and I focused on team career development, selling & educating technology to clients, and process improvement. I had a desk on the 28th floor of a building in Barcelona where I could see the beach below. It was nice. I had fun; it was never going to last.

  • Senior Java / ATG Developer

    eDreams

    (Public Company; 51-200 employees; Leisure, Travel & Tourism industry)

    November 1999 — September 2000 (11 months)

    Java software developer where I learnt ATG Dynamo. Occasional project manager and team leader, working initially in San Francisco then later Barcelona of what could only be called a mad place to work at the time. Mad but immensely fun.

  • Technical Consultant

    ie3

    (Financial Services industry)

    1997 — 1998 (1 year )

  • Cofounding Director

    MPS

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    1996 — 1997 (1 year )

    Musick Point Software was our foray into the World of Business after our stint at the University of Auckland. We worked with Java and sold user experience services (e.g. breakfast presentation to New Zealand Computer Society: 'usability, the next competitive advantage') -- both somewhat ahead of our time, particularly in New Zealand.

  • Research programmer

    University of Auckland

    (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

    1993 — 1997 (4 years )

    This was a Mac / Unix environment. My career highlights from this age was to write a portable communications library, 'platform independent packets' which was source-compatible with Mac front end clients (8Mhz Mac SEs mostly!) and our Digital Unix back ends. Through some 4-byte char hacks I managed to get code that would send binary-compatible data even though the front end was big endian and the back end was little-endian. [Learn more on endianness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness]

    I rewrote the Computer Science Department's resource management suite: machine bookings, printing, and internet data usage, the latter is when students had to pay for internet traffic. The latter, 'Net Guardian', was then rolled out across the University of Auckland.

    Mac GUIs were very sophisticated for the time, based on a GUI library I cowrote with a friend of mine, Richard Knuckey. We called it The Screen Manager and it should've rocked the world, but we got hung up on commercial issues.

Julian Harris’s Education

  • University of Auckland

    Postgraduate Study in Internet & Web Technologies 1994 — 1995

    As a research assistant at the Computer Science Department in Auckland University, I was able to continue study.

    The internet had been around for many years in 1994 but obviously the web was nascent. I got early inroads into the web development; really at its forefront back then when 'there was this thing called NSCA Mosaic' and 'the world was still trying to decide whether to choose WWW, Gopher (a hierarchical information metaphor), or WAIS (Wide-Area Information Service'). The chief reservations the academics had about WWW was that it wasn't searchable. Natch.

  • University of Auckland

    Postgraduate Study Object-Oriented Design 1993 — 1994

    As a research assistant at the Computer Science Department in Auckland University, I was able to continue study.

  • University of Auckland

    BSc , Computer Science , January 1990 — December 1992

    Activities and Societies:
    Mountain biking, roller blading, roller hockey (fun stuff in streets, not serious), photography, electronic music composition, spiritual development, leadership, hiking, global conspiracies

Additional Information

Julian Harris’s Websites:

Julian Harris’s Groups:

  •    Googlers & Xooglers
  •    Agile Project Management Group
  •    Conchango Alumni

Julian Harris’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

  • expertise requests
  • reference requests
  • getting back in touch

View Full Profile

Public profile powered by: LinkedIn

Create a public profile: Sign In or Join Now

View Julian Harris’s full profile:

  • See who you and Julian Harris know in common
  • Get introduced to Julian Harris
  • Contact Julian Harris directly

View Full Profile