What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I discovered Scrum in 2004 and became a Certified Scrum Master in September of that year. At that time I was a Development Manager running a development team of 12 people. We worked on a rather large (and subsequently hugely successful and also industry-award-winning) project that launched in 2006. I remained with the team as we continued to add features to the product, scaled it to meet spectacular growth, and established operating procedures and tools to maintain excellent customer experience.
Throughout this project I became more and more passionate about Scrum, and I helped the spread of Scrum within the company. I became a Certified Scrum Master Trainer (CST) in 2006. By mid-2007, Scrum was being used and abused by at least a third of our development teams (perhaps as many as 800 developers doing Scrum), and I was able to convince management to create the corporate position of Agile Trainer and Coach, which I promptly took.
So I have been an Agile coach since July, 2007 in a primarily Scrum and Lean environment. In my job I now train Scrum Masters (as a CST), coach teams that are adopting Scrum for the first time, try to diagnose and fix process problems for teams that are having trouble, and occasionally take entire organizations "from 0 to Scrum". I've worked with about 30 teams in the past nine months. Most of those engagements could be termed successful.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I'm particularly interested in how to diagnose and fix poor Scrum implementations without simply going back and doing a complete restart. Since I haven't had the chance to work with other coaches, I don't know what kinds of engagements people typically use for these things. My second area of interest would be in how to reach middle management with training and coaching for managing scrum teams.
How do you plan to contribute?
My experiences to date are rich and replete with success and failure, particularly with regard to training and viral enterprise Agile evolution. I should have a lot to contribute in discussions. I also work in an unusually interrupt-driven environment that has driven some innovation in our Scrum implementations that I think can be valuable to others who have this issue.
I discovered Scrum in 2004 and became a Certified Scrum Master in September of that year. At that time I was a Development Manager running a development team of 12 people. We worked on a rather large (and subsequently hugely successful and also industry-award-winning) project that launched in 2006. I remained with the team as we continued to add features to the product, scaled it to meet spectacular growth, and established operating procedures and tools to maintain excellent customer experience.
Throughout this project I became more and more passionate about Scrum, and I helped the spread of Scrum within the company. I became a Certified Scrum Master Trainer (CST) in 2006. By mid-2007, Scrum was being used and abused by at least a third of our development teams (perhaps as many as 800 developers doing Scrum), and I was able to convince management to create the corporate position of Agile Trainer and Coach, which I promptly took.
So I have been an Agile coach since July, 2007 in a primarily Scrum and Lean environment. In my job I now train Scrum Masters (as a CST), coach teams that are adopting Scrum for the first time, try to diagnose and fix process problems for teams that are having trouble, and occasionally take entire organizations "from 0 to Scrum". I've worked with about 30 teams in the past nine months. Most of those engagements could be termed successful.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I'm particularly interested in how to diagnose and fix poor Scrum implementations without simply going back and doing a complete restart. Since I haven't had the chance to work with other coaches, I don't know what kinds of engagements people typically use for these things. My second area of interest would be in how to reach middle management with training and coaching for managing scrum teams.
How do you plan to contribute?
My experiences to date are rich and replete with success and failure, particularly with regard to training and viral enterprise Agile evolution. I should have a lot to contribute in discussions. I also work in an unusually interrupt-driven environment that has driven some innovation in our Scrum implementations that I think can be valuable to others who have this issue.