I’ve had a fascinating 5 years working in the Agile Business Line at Collabnet. When I started I worked in Technical Support, from there I moved into Technical Sales, and from there into Agile Training and Coaching with a twist.
The twist is that nearly all of the work I do within the Agile industry is with people who are beyond that initial adoption stage. They typically understand what Agile really is and what the basics of practicing it are. This means that I have spent little time evangelizing Scrum and Agile to developers, and a lot of time working with Managers and Executives to solve the problems that arise when their development teams produce software in such a different way then the organizational structure just isn’t built to accommodate the improvements.
Why do they talk to me? I’m selling software and they are looking to software to fix everything. As much as I would love to say software can fix every problem the truth is that it can’t, but it can certainly make most aspects of an Agile transition smooth.
So where am I going with this rambling anyway? I do have a point, believe it or not. On February 14th I have the pleasure of presenting on this topic in Arlington Virginia. You can find details of the event hosted by Carahsoft here.
These events are great because they give me the opportunity to set people off on the right path when it comes to an agile Transition. There are a lot of ingredients that come together to make a Framework like Scrum actually work and I always find it to be a very rewarding experience to help people arrive at that understanding. It’s not just about selling a piece of software and walking away, it’s about getting to that deep understanding that is required to see some of the amazing benefits you hear about real Agile teams receiving. It’s also about showing people who don’t understand what they get out of Agile the benefits that are not immediately obvious.
I love it.
Caleb has been working with Agile for the past 5 years. Working primarily with Agile from a software standpoint has given him a great deal of time to work with mid size and enterprise organizations looking to solve issues with software. As it turns out, most problems are too complex to solve with just software, so Caleb has worked with these companies to put sound agile practice in place alongside tooling. He also has Scrum certifications, giving him nifty letters behind his name like CSPO and CSM.
