Dean Latchana

Current

• Certified Scrum Master at BBC
• Technical Project Manager at BBC
• Web Consultant, Project Lead & Developer at latchana.co.uk

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Past

• Technical Project Manager for Big Cat at BBC
• Technical Project Manager (acting) at BBC
• Senior Web Developer at BBC

2 more...

Recommended

2 people have recommended Dean

Connections

49 connections

Industry

Internet

Dean Latchana’s Summary

Dean is a Technical Project Manager at the BBC. He's been the technical lead and consultant on sites such as bbc.co.uk/bigcat, bbc.co.uk/crimewatch and bbc.co.uk/bbcfour.

Dean also works as a freelance web developer and consultant.

Dean is a strong advocate of clearly understanding a business's vision and targets, thus enabling teams to carefully elicit and thoroughly understand the context of a project's requirement-set. Dean also advocates continuous testing of project assumptions using techniques such as rapid prototyping, user-testing and usage metrics.

Dean ensures these approaches and practices are implemented through the application of appropriate project management methodologies, which are sensitive to the project needs and the client's culture.

Dean is an advocate of agile project management methodologies. To this end, he is a qualified Certified Scrum Master.

Dean's goal is to continue to work closely with colleagues to assemble and manage teams to deliver cost-effective, user-centric websites and online services.

Dean Latchana’s Specialties:

scrum master, user-centric project delivery, agile project & resource managment, web accessibility consultancy, standards-based web development

Dean Latchana’s Experience

• Certified Scrum Master

  BBC

  (Public Company; BBC; Broadcast Media industry)

  March 2009 — Present (11 months)

  As part of my position as Technical Project Manager at the BBC, I have taken on the role of Scrum Master. This follows my qualification as Certified Scrum Master. In this role I'm managing a team, project requirements and external dependencies to create an online EPG for bbc.co.uk.
  
  Following the Scrum's agile framework, I'm managing multiple stakeholder expectations and closely facilitating the team and product owner.
  
  The team consists of a product owner (senior producer), visual designer, back-end & front-end developers, user testers and a technical architect. The service is built using the BBC's new Forge technology stack. More specifically, we're using PHP with Zend, Zenoss monitoring, Yaml to optimise feeds and memcache for caching.
  
  I'm advocating a release strategy which maximises an early return-on-investment, so that customers and users gain benefits as soon as possible. This is also helping to support flexibility in the project's intentions and deadlines.
  
  Contact me if you'd like to learn more about how the project is managed.

• Technical Project Manager

  BBC

  (Public Company; BBC; Broadcast Media industry)

  June 2007 — Present (2 years 8 months)

  Previous to this I was a Senior Web Developer at the BBC from 2001.
  
  Technical consultant and technical project lead for multiple projects for BBC bbc.co.uk. Current projects cover TV channel websites such as bbc.co.uk/bbcone and bbc.co.uk/bbcfour. Working with web producers to elicit and prioritise stakeholder & end-user requirements. Investigating technical solutions and architecture. Project managing iterative implementation with designers, developers and other web specialists.

• Web Consultant, Project Lead & Developer

  latchana.co.uk

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  January 2002 — Present (8 years 1 month)

  As a freelancer Dean has successfully partnered with numerous clients to consult, build & improve upon their professional web-based businesses. From providing guidance on fulfilling a visionary concept, through to day-to-day maintenance and improvement, Dean has a wealth of experience helping clients fulfill their goals, and helping to provide results with an immediate & on-going return on investment.