About Me

Rowan Bunning is a Certified Scrum Trainer and a pioneer of Scrum in Australasia. Having worked in an Extreme Programming (XP) environment since 2000, Rowan learned about Scrum in 2003 and subsequently led an organisation-wide transition to Scrum combined with XP at an innovative Australian software company producing bespoke applications for Government clients and exporting enterprise products internationally.

Rowan became Australia’s first Certified ScrumMaster in February 2005 and the country’s first Certified Scrum Practitioner in October 2006. He has a strong relationship with Europe's most experienced Certified Scrum Trainer and Practitioner with whom he has studied, consulted and co-trained. Rowan’s Scrum mentor is one of Europe’s leading experts on Extreme Programming and has guided organsations such as SAP and Nokia mobile through their global Scrum roll-outs. He now specialises in social complexity science and its application to Agile processes.

Rowan has worked in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland as an Agile Coach with one of Europe's leaders in Scrum - Conchango (now EMC Conchango). In addition to Scrum training and retrospective facilitation, Rowan played a hands-on ScrumMastering role in the development of a major new web property for one of Ireland's leading media organisations involving distributed development between the U.K., Ireland and Romania. After overcoming some challenges, the successful launch of this online business, on time and within budget, was greeted with a good deal of praise from the client.

Rowan is now an independent consultant helping organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand to succeed with Agile through training and hands-on coaching. He has consulted to organisations ranging from start-ups to widely recognised software vendors with distributed development operations circling the globe. His training offerings include the two day Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product owner courses with associated accreditations with the Scrum Alliance. He also offers one day courses on Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating and Planning as licensed from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software – author of the most popular books on these topics.

Rowan is highly active in the Agile community internationally and has spoken at several conferences in Europe and North America including the London Scrum Gathering in 2007. In Australia, Rowan founded a successful Agile special interest group supported by the Australian Computer Society and helped to initiate Scrum User Groups in Sydney and Brisbane.

Rowan holds a Bachelor of Information Technology degree from the University of Canberra where he went on to tutor final year and post-graduate students in object-oriented software design. He has a strong technical background in web development and Smalltalk. The latter is the first commercially successful object-oriented development environment which was used for the first Scrum and XP projects.

In his spare time, Rowan enjoys jogging, cycling and scuba diving. He has a particular interest in live music having played violin, keyboards and guitar for many years in groups ranging from classical chamber orchestras to rock bands.

Rowan’s motivation for pursuing Agile stems from the substantial waste, poor delivery track-record and lack of trust that he sees around IT projects in many organisations. He passionately believes that there is enormous potential to improve business value, collaboration and productivity through a disciplined application of agile methods.

You can learn more about Rowan via his website at www.softwarewithstyle.com and his blog at blog.softwarewithstyle.com. For the more highly connected, Rowan is LinkedIn, Twitters, Skypes and does like to TripIt quite frequently!