Over two decades in the agile space!
I like to think about myself as an agility-think agent as my past experience encouraged adapting quickly and effectively to changing circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. Shifting between different thinking styles, dealing with uncertainty, and responding in a creative and flexible manner. I enjoy the challenge of VUCA environments, where adaptability, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and proactive problem solving are all called upon.
I have failed more often than succeeded. Failures taught me things, provided experience. Success baselined my gained experience and promoted a desire to continue learning and experiencing.
While agile a novelty through the 2000’s I used certifications to understand and gain some authority to play-around with stuff as I realised that not one methodology suited all problems.
In all these years my experiences lead me to create some useful stuff to solve the problems I was facing at the time, some highlights include,
– Integrated Scrum practices into Prince2 in order to conciliate a CEO’ view of command and control with the willingness of development teams to iterate, inspect and adapt – lntegration of Scrum into Prince2 (2012)
– Designed an operating system to implement agile and guide a 300 people strong unit towards agility – The Agile Operating System (2017)
– Figured out a simplistic explanation of agile to guide some reluctant teams on the agile way to agility – Simple Agile (2022)
– Promoted an option to transform a struggling organisation to an agile mode following a three way path through an understanding phase, followed by the implementation of a system of change, any then improving a system of delivery – Bringing Agile to the Organisation (2023)
– Helped some teams stuck in a sort of cargo cult agile towards an approach that took them beyond agile by focusing on problem solving, dependency integration, and effective value delivery – Beyond Agile (2024)
Now towards the tail end of my career I started putting pen on paper about what I experienced, some victories, many finger burning, but quite some fun and lots of acquaintances.
From many of the thought leaders I had the opportunity to meet and study I sort of knitted a particular way of thinking that I’ve been using ever since. Never spoke publicly about it, nor wrote seriously about it. Only played what was in front of me … and this blog which houses my musings about agility.
… and here’s a tale of my agile trip: From Simple Agility to Systems Thinking
Agile Ways 