INGENIOUS AGILE INC.
ST PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

I am an agile consultant and trainer passionate in helping organizations in their agile adoptions within their departments, programs or simply piloting one team. I have experience in a variety of industries from travel, education, retail, banking, credit card, auto and health with special interest in non-IT areas of organizations such as marketing. I find great joy in helping others reach their own potentials in solving business problems, become predictable and innovative. I believe in smart, innovate using the framework that meets your needs. The best reward is creating independent, self-sufficient agile programs and teams that can continue their agile journey on their own from my help. My background started in education, but my professional journey moved into working with software development with focuses in product and portfolio/project management which eventually lead me to my passion with agile. Agile started with helping to improve how we think and approach developing software, but has transcended beyond the technical realm. I still work with IT areas of the business, but I keep any open mind to how agile can help with other areas; like my former roots in education. I hope you enjoy my journey with agile in both traditional software development and area outside these limits. What do you plan on doing today to contribute to the iteration goal? Have team members who are working on the story discuss what they have completed the day before, what they plan on doing today and if anything is blocking story I sat in one of the sessions where principals from two schools in Arizona that turned their entire school agile spoke about their journey. It was so inspiring and uplifting to know agile can help children-how cool is that? Hope High School’s Principal, Krissyn Sumare, took us through her journey with help from My current engagement involves with remote and distributed teams. I thought we would try it out Lean Coffee Table during one of the team retrospectives. We are always looking to fill our toolbox with goodies to spice up a virtual retrospective. It actually went quite well based on my personal experience and feedback. I did notice there are some UI issues with IE, but Chrome and Firefox work fine. What I like about the tool is that it is guided, very easy to understand and less complicated to vote like when using Google Sheets or Trello. This was made specifically to host a virtual lean coffee. Love it! I actually forgot to take picture of this first game, so no visuals on this one. We broke into groups of 10 and each group sat in a circle with one person starting in the middle. The person in middle starts the game out by saying something about themselves in a statement starting with “Anyone who.. has kids, is a Scrum Master, eats ice cream for dinner”.. the list goes on. It was a lot of fun to watch and by group feedback; a lot of fun to play. This is great ice breaker activity or team building to help create a more warm, safe and trusting relationship between the team members. The group enjoyed this game because it only lasted 10 minutes and did not require any prep. I gave the groups the product I wanted them to work with for this game. It was luggage. The first activity required them to think in their groups every reason why this luggage product would After each group shared their list of items that would NOT let the luggage succeed, we moved onto the second part of the activity which has the group list off things that WILL Succeed with this product. We also had one volunteer to track how many times a team member says, “Yes but.” After the game, people were now cognizant and aware how negative opinions can derail and discourage impacts creativity. Positive thinking, how we see the world contributes the success of ventures based on how we see the world. Agile in your company is that same journey. Let me be clear, it is a Pick an agile framework that best meets the problems your company is trying to solve at the team level- (customer, product ownership and team.) Scrum, XP, Kanban? where people come to their company to learn what unique way to be agile. As I have stated in my previous blog post, I bring my background in teaching to my current experience. I honestly, do not see much difference when it comes to learning. No one wants to sit through a presentation -“death by Power Point.” As a former Science teacher, engaging the students through activities that help understand topics like genetics or electrons. We used through the art of play and innovated games. I found an activity that taught genetics through the use of X-Men. I do not know about you, but I grew up on X-Men Saturday mornings. I still love them! I found this quite interesting and became intrigued since I am now focusing on more helping this corporation on the business side versus IT. I actually kind of like it. I have found that every time there is training; either it being a scrum master certification class or an agile tool- they feel like it is always IT centric and they become disengaged. If anyone is reading this out there- know your audience and customize your training to be relevant! I found showing this to the group of people I work along with the original manifesto brings more meaning and buy-in as to why to approach the way they work with an agile mind set. We are discovering better ways of creating value for our customers and for our organizations through new approaches to marketing. Through this work, we have come to value: Great marketing requires close alignment with the business people, sales and development Coaching does not always require to be onsite 100% of the time. We give you your space to learn, apply and adapt. We tailor to what makes sense to help you meet your goals. So much focus has been to help IT areas with their agile journey. We are here to help with other areas within the organization help achieve Business Agility. Want to introduce more product innovation and design thinking? Does HR need help with role definition, performance reviews and how to keep knowledge workers motivated in an agile culture?