December 30, 2008

About me

My name is Sondre Skaug Bjørnebekk, and I thought it would be appropriate to write a few words introducing myself. When interviewing for the job I currently have, I ended up saying in one of the interviews that I probably have the brain of an engineer and the soul of a salesman... While this may sound terrible to some (“Do salesmen even have souls?”, I hear some shout in the back), it is probably not that far from the truth. If you add a touch of enthusiasm and entrepreneurship mixed with hard work (we are descendants of the puritans that moved north, after all...) you are about there.

I hold an MSc degree in computer science from NTNU (the Norwegian University of Technology and Science) and an MBA in technology management from NTNU and MIT Sloan. For some more details and hard facts, you may visit my LinkedIn profile.

I used to be software architect, then CTO and later VP of Consulting at a small (but steadily growing!) Norwegian ISV, Inspera. Currently I work as a Principle Consultant with the PA Consulting Group. All views expressed in this blog are my own and not necessarily related at all to those of my employer.

At Inspera, I managed projects of various size and complexity – some large ones with several thousand hours of development, coordination between different vendors and subcontractors as well as optimizing product development along with customer specific projects – interesting and challenging indeed. As head of the project department, I was also trying to formalize the knowhow of my project managers and developers on what worked and what didn’t in trying to deliver successful and profitable projects.

I have also run my own, very small, company since 1998. There I’ve developed various pieces of software including a recruitment portal, webshops and games for mobile devices and currently this is where I can still get my hands dirty and not only be a project management monkey, but sometimes even a code monkey! In addition to my main work at PA and the side activity in Webmagi, I serve as a board member at Inspera.

On the personal side I have been married for a little more than five years. We are voluntarily without children at this point and living in Oslo, Norway – right here in fact.

I think that’s it about me. My next post will be the first with some real project management related content. It will be about the need I have often found to connect the world of software development with lightweight or agile methods, with the expectations of structured reporting and overview often found in customer organizations. I hope to publish that one the coming Friday, January 2nd.

4 comments:

  1. A quick update on the current state of affairs in case anyone reads this post: As noted in a different post I currently run my own company, Innovation Consulting. There I try to do some exciting product development and combine it with advising clients on internet technology and business models. Currently I am the one and only employee in Norway, but I have a full time system developer working for me in Timisoara, Romania.

    In the spring of 2010 I also lectured at college level (Norwegian School of Information Technology) in two subjects, e-business and introduction to XML.

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  2. Wow, time flies - in case anyone wonders:
    - Now thee full time developers and one part time designer in Timisoara, still just me in Norway
    - Moved to Meltzers gate 3, still in Oslo
    - Still doing some teaching gigs, both virtual (Project Economics at NKI) and physical (e-business and most likely Entrepreneurship at NITH), from time to time

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  3. Big changes in four years since the previous comment and the 8+ since the original blog post. Keeping the original 2008 post as-is and giving a quick update here:
    - Just returned from my honeymoon after getting married first in Oslo, then in Timisoara (where I still work up to a week per month and met Aurora in a concert where one of my software developers played guitar)
    - Current address for both Aurora and me is Gøteborggata 16 in Oslo
    - Running TapBookAuthor.com takes up half my time and the other half goes to consulting and the rest for other projects/products we consider launching (100%+ pun intended!)

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  4. Even more exciting changes as David arrived June 29th this year!

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