James Goebel | 01:45 – 03:00

Abstract

Many teams attempt to adopt agile by focusing on the process, the practices, or the tools. All too often, this results in a new vocabulary but the same old outcomes. Imagine adopting agile with the goal of intentionally changing the relationships between team members. Perhaps effective agile adoption is best seen as a deep culture change initiative. What kind of outcomes could your team achieve if you cultivate transparency, actively remove fear from the environment, and focus on creating joyful results for your customers?

Speaker

James Goebel is a founding partner of Menlo Innovations. Menlo uses highly collaborative project teams to design and implement innovative products for clients that place high value on user adoption.

The team he helped build at Menlo Innovations has successfully blended an Extreme Programming development team, usability design specialists, a quality assurance practice, and formal project management. Representatives from start-up companies as well as large Fortune 500 firms routinely tour Menlo’s Software Factory environment to study its implementation of agile.

James has worked in a variety of environments, from 2 employee startups up to billion dollar organizations. As a coach and change agent, James has helped organizations achieve dramatic transformations in both process and culture. He enjoys speaking at conferences, teaching classes, and speaking to small local groups in order to share the lessons he has learned.

James is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a certified Scrum Master, and has an MBA from Eastern Michigan University. He has practiced software product development for more than twenty years as a developer, team lead, system architect, project manager, practice director, and executive coach. For the past fifteen years he has been building and managing Agile software teams.