Erik Brickarp

Manage People

I'm currently group manager at Veoneer and it's the role I've enjoyed the most as well as the role where I personally think I've performed the best. My strength as a manager is finding ways to make people thrive while still contributing towards a common goal.

Manage Testing

Depending on the testing experience in an organization I can either take more of a facilitating role (coach smart people to take even smarter decisions) or more of a mentoring role (I'll use my experience, leadership and teaching skills to guide them). Testing interests me less and less though so even if I'm still active in many testing forums I've taken a big step in a more non-tech focused direction.

Agile Coach

I've been studying agile since around 2008, been an "agile evangelist" since not long after and was previously an agile coach at Veoneer/Arriver. I'm also fairly active in the local agile community and have a background as a product owner.

Lead Change Programs

This is something I've worked a lot with without it being "my main role". For instance I've had an active role in an agile transformation at Ericsson, test process improvements at Zenterio and all sorts of big and small changes at Verisure and Veoneer/Arriver.

2017 I attended Jason Little's Lean Change Management workshop.

Lead Communities of Practice

I'm an experienced facilitator and community manager so this is a role that once again fits well with my skillset. It's also something I've done as part of my work as test coach (Verisure), tester (Ericsson) and agile coach (Veoneer/Arriver).

Education

I have a background in both coaching, teaching, course followups, organizing learning events and finding courses for colleagues. So I'm probably one of the more complete packages you'll find when it comes to managing education and/or developing employees.

Test Coaching

I can test software and have nothing against doing that as long as it's not my main responsibility. What I prefer more though is to coach developers or testers in testing either by pair-testing with them or by facilitating risk/test meetings where we work out how we'll cover a particularily complex thing to test.

Limited patience

I will make things happen fast and my lack of patience has motivated me to become an expert learner. Things that cannot be rushed can easily frustrate me though and I'm generally more prone to errors when doing things that require a slow, methodical approach. This has subsided somewhat though with age (for better and worse) but it's still worth noting.

Variety

I can be an invaluable catalys in projects that are either just starting up or have stalled. I'm also flexible in where you put me and generally don't mind being moved around. My energy gradually drops though as things become routine and I also tend to sometimes take on too many tasks at once.

Open personality

I'm very open with how I think and I expect a certain level of transparency back. My openness makes people share sensitive information with me which, combined with my coaching skills, helps me deal with things before they become problems. In organizations with low transparency though I can become a disruption.

Smile & Laugh

"It's not unprofessional to have fun but to do something in a boring way that could just as well be done in a fun way, that's unprofessional"
//Klas Hallberg (translated from Swedish)

I live by this quote and spread a lot of smiles and laughs around me. I'm also skilled at identifying and eliminating "energy drainers". Sometimes I take the fun part one step too far however and have come across as not taking things serious enough.