Daniel’s Profile

Daniel Terhorst-North uses his deep technical and operational knowledge to help business and technology leaders to optimise their organisations. He puts people first and finds simple, pragmatic solutions to complex business and technology problems.

With over thirty years of industry experience, Daniel is often invited to speak at major conferences and corporate events worldwide.

Daniel’s career splits broadly into separate decades:

Third decade: independent consultant

Since 2012, Daniel has been an independent consultant, optimising organisations from 50 to 5,000 people. He does this by engaging with their technology and operational strategy, leadership and management practices, organisation design, and ways of working.

His unique approach involves listening to the people on the ground as well as senior leadership to uncover where the real issues are, rather than implementing a one-size-fits-all solution.

He has worked with many organisations as an independent. The case studies below represent a cross-section of these engagements, highlighting the context, the impact on the organisation, and the approach he took to achieve this.

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Case study 1: Doubling throughput, twice

The context

The impact

The approach


Case study 2: Getting 90 people facing the same way

The context

The impact

The approach


Case study 3: Transforming the engineering culture

The context

The impact

The approach


Case study 4: Sowing the seeds of change

The context

The impact

The approach


Case study 5: Creating a strategy in a day

The context

The impact

The approach

Second decade: Thoughtworks consultant

Daniel joined the newly formed London office of global technology consultancy Thoughtworks as its first tech employee in 2002, when there were only three UK staff and a bridgehead of 30 consultants from the main Chicago office. Over the next nine years, he helped to grow the office to 250 professional services consultants and pioneered several advances in agile ways of working.

At Thoughtworks, he invented Behaviour-Driven-Development, co-authored the original Deployment Production Line paper (direct download), now known as build pipelines, and led teams that developed many of the Continuous Delivery patterns and techniques.

During this time, he built a reputation as a speaker at international conferences on topics from team dynamics and agile methods to programming and architecture.

The engagements below illustrate his breadth and impact during his time at Thoughtworks.

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Scandinavian Oil Company – adviser, trainer, facilitator to CxO team

Daniel prepared and delivered two days of intense workshops covering enterprise architecture, agile adoption, procurement and technology strategy to senior developers, architects and CxO-level technology and business stakeholders. These sessions directly influenced their strategic direction and some of the outputs have been adopted as core vocabulary within the organisation.

International Standards Body – enterprise architecture consultant

Daniel worked with the chief architect of a standards body to develop a three year enterprise architecture strategy. This encompassed hardware and infrastructure growth, strategic technology direction, legacy integration, disaster recovery and hosting through to organisational structure and development practices.

Tier 1 Investment Bank – technology adviser, tech lead, agile process coach

Daniel joined a project team new to agile, tasked with reimplementing a Java service platform communicating between .NET rich clients and a legacy C++ trading system. Daniel quickly identified that the proposed solution would have the same intrinsic problems as its predecessors, namely coupling between clients and services, versioning issues, maintainability and operational stability.

He successfully pitched a major redesign and led the team to implement the revised solution within the same timeframe, meeting the objectives of independent versioning of services, automated build and deployment, and clean, maintainable code.

Fortune 500 Fund Manager – agile programme coach, build master

Daniel coached the agile transition of a programme team of 50 people distributed between the UK and India. The team was new to both agile delivery and the particular technology stack (WebSphere Portal Server). He oversaw the adoption of practices such as test-driven development, pair programming, continuous integration, adaptive planning and story-based analysis. He used a combination of workshops and on-the-ground coaching, and encouraged feedback in the form of self-assessments and retrospectives to monitor success.

As build lead he used open source technologies to automate the build, deployment and testing of J2EE components such as portlets and web services from multiple interdependent project streams. He used open source technologies running on Linux blade servers, and presented this solution at the Agile 2006 conference as the Build Production Line.

Major clothing brand – J2EE performance tuning

Daniel spent a month performance tuning a business-critical Enterprise Java application. He reduced the start-up time for the application from 10 minutes to under 5 seconds, improved the search times for the highest value searches by an order of magnitude, and simplified the core architecture of the application, making the data management operations more than twice as fast. Technologies included IBM WebSphere application server and a mainframe-hosted IBM DB2 database.

Major UK retailer – developing training programme

Daniel designed, prepared and delivered a training program over several weeks to cross-train a group of developers with diverse technical backgrounds (mainframe, ERP, Oracle) in skills such as agile software development, OOAD, Java and J2EE. Starting from a basic introduction to object-oriented development, he took them through the principles of agile project delivery, test-driven development and the major Java and J2EE libraries and technologies. Using demonstrations, presentations and hands-on programming exercises, the group developed their own asynchronous instant messaging application.

First decade: software developer

From graduate to senior developer, then tech lead and executive roles as VP Engineering and Director of Development, Daniel worked across sectors including investment banking, insurance, telecoms, vehicle leasing, custom software development, using a variety of languages and technologies.

Technologies included Enterprise Java, Python, Unix shell, SQL (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite), Ruby, C++, Perl, in environments from high-performance bare metal (low-latency trading) to virtual machines and containers.

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Senior Developer – Motability Finance Limited

Daniel was involved in the development of a large J2EE and XML-based vehicle pricing and resale system with an immovable deadline. As a member of a 30 person team, he developed various business components, from use cases through to implementation, including a robust XML messaging gateway application. Daniel designed and developed a pilot Web Service-oriented solution to integrate various bespoke legacy applications across PowerBuilder, VB, SAP and Java. Technologies used include Java, Design Patterns, J2EE, EJB, struts, JMS, XML, XSL, Web Services, SOAP, UML, SQL Server, SilverStream, JBoss.

VP Development – Cadrion Technologies

Daniel headed up an 8-strong development team in an ERP start-up company developing a J2EE-based recruitment and skills matching system. He was involved in all areas of development: hiring, mentoring, architecture, analysing requirements, component- and object-modelling, development and testing. Technologies used include Java, J2EE, EJB, struts, XML, XSL, UML, SQL Server, Orion, WebLogic, stochastics and agile methodologies (XP).

Director of Development – The Wirestation

Daniel acted as mentor, team lead and architect/developer for a web development consultancy on multiple large and small projects with a team of six developers, joining as a contract developer and becoming the acting Director of Development. He introduced agile XP practices and J2EE and XML-based technologies, integrating these with existing web applications such as content management systems. Technologies used include Java, J2EE, EJB, Design Patterns, XML, XSL, Perl, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, MySQL, Orion, Apache Cocoon, XP.

Contract Developer – Virgin Net

Daniel was part of a team of 10 developers adding functionality to ISP Virgin Net’s web portal. He developed a secure Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server for their ISP subscribers and administered access and security for an Apache web server. Technologies used include Perl, C, UNIX (Linux, Solaris) shell scripting, Apache web server, HTML, HTTP/HTTPS.

Contract Developer – MCI WorldCom

Daniel was an architect and senior developer in a team of 20 developers, creating robust and scalable C++ system components for a pan-European telecoms billing system. These included fail-safe memory management components and self-managing database queries. Technologies used include C++, Sybase, UNIX (HP/UX) shell scripting, UNIX systems programming.

Contract Developer – Reuters

Daniel was a developer in a small team developing a global credit limit system. He was responsible for integrating a legacy relational database with an object database and building various C++ components, as well as improving the development and testing environment. Technologies used include Microsoft Visual C++, Visual Studio, ObjectStore, Sybase.

Developer – Banque Paribas

Daniel developed FX back office software for a AAA-rated merchant bank. He planned and co-ordinated the migration of a business-critical relational database onto a new platform, and managed software releases into a 24-hour production environment. He defined the strategy for business continuity planning (disaster recovery) and .

Head of Development – NDL International / Claritas

Daniel was head of development for a direct marketing company, and was the project lead in developing a marketing database product incorporating lifestyle and demographic data for over 20 million UK consumers, using Electoral Roll data across 44 million registered voters. As well as hands-on development, key responsibilities included planning and managing a multi-phase project, performing business and systems analysis and design, defined acceptance criteria, beta-test and roll-out and co-ordinating training plans. Technologies used include C and UNIX shell scripts, make and Imake, low-level UNIX system programming, SunOS, Solaris and SCO UNIX.

Programmer – Crosfield Electronics

Daniel developed a client/server-based image archiver in C and UNIX shell for a company specialising in electronic pre-press systems. He designed and implemented image-processing software, an encrypted license-based software server, and a system that installed the SunOS operating system and software packages.

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