- What is my experience coaching teams toward being more agile?
I am currently on the services team at VersionOne. I run around the country helping teams learn how to use the VersionOne product and often find myself introducing clients to agile practices and agile team dynamics. When not on the road, I blog on project management topics at (www.leadingagile.com) and on the VersionOne site (www.agilechronicles.com ). I contribute to the community through podcasts, whitepapers, and speaking engagements.
Most of my experience prior to VersionOne was working with large organizations and teams of teams. The past several years, I was a senior project manager for CheckFree corporation. I ran of portfolio of projects for an agile organization of about 100 or so people. Depending on what was going on, we would have anywhere from 10-15 small teams working on various projects or pieces of larger projects. I coached each of the teams through the agile project management processes, tooling and metrics, and ran the scrum of scrums. The rest of the organization was not agile at all, so I spent a bunch of time working with the broader organization to lead change and to map agile processes into the standard PMO stuff such that the team could be agile and the PMO still got what it needed. I did a bunch of formal training and lunch-and-learn sessions on iterative and incremental development.
I also have some experience using agile in a distributed offshore environment. I managed a 25 person development team in India and integrated them into our development shop. I’ve been to India a few times to work out agile agreements and to train our team on agile practices.
I was involved with the creation of the DSDM Agile Project Leader certification and am the current Treasurer of APLN.
- What do you plan to learn/explore at this conference?
To be honest, I am interested in talking with people that have small team experience. Coming from a PM background, I am interested with learning from coaches that come from the development perspective. I would like to explore what agile looks like when it meets the ‘real’ world. How are people operating in hybrid organizations? How are people are managing through transitions? How are agile teams dealing with PMOs and people that don’t get it?
- How do you plan to contribute?
I come from a traditional background and maintain my PMP certification. Sorry… can I still come <grin>? I think I can help the group understand better how traditional organizations view the message of agile and what we can do to help bridge the gap. I can speak some to the role of architecture in organizing agile teams. I bring the large team perspective and the offshore perspective. I can certainly bring a ‘tooling’ perspective to the discussion and share some insights on how teams are scaling agile.