Agile For All adds three new members to the team

In case you missed the press release, Peter Green, Adobe Systems Agile Transformation Leader, will join our Agile For All team on March 16th. I am personally excited about Peter’s amazing contributions to the Agile community and his enterprise level experience. I’m also excited to say that Peter isn’t the only one joining the team!

For those of you that don’t know him, Peter led a grass roots Agile transformation at Adobe from 2005 to 2015, starting with his own team, Adobe Audition. His influence includes the teams behind such software flagships as Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro, as well as dozens of internal IT and platform technology teams and groups like marketing and globalization. Peter has always shared with the rest of the Certified Scrum Trainer community the things that worked, and those that didn’t work for him at Adobe. I’ve always been impressed by his openness.

His work was a major factor enabling Adobe product teams to make the critical business transition from perpetual desktop products to the subscription-based service, Creative Cloud. His hands-on Scrum and Agile training and coaching helped lay the groundwork to shift teams from two-year product cycles to frequent delivery of high-quality software and services. It is quite rare for a large, established software company like Adobe to successfully transition to the cloud. As Patrick Seitz wrote in Investor’s Business Daily, “In terms of building up its cloud subscriber base, Adobe is hitting it out of the ballpark.”

More recently, Peter collaborated with Adobe’s VP of Creativity Mark Randall to develop the now open-source Adobe KickBox program, described in Fast Company here and more recently on Forbes.com here.

Regarding the transition to Agile For All, Peter said, “There were two key factors for me in deciding to leave Adobe and join Agile For All. First of all, I’ve been a big fan of the Agile For All team Bob Hartman, Richard Lawrence and Peter Saddington for a long time. They constantly strive to improve their own approaches to training and coaching, and to openly share what they learn with the broader agile community. Secondly, I’ve been really impressed with the companies that they work with. These companies are trying lots of cool new approaches to running a business that are closely aligned with my own personal perspective — trust people, and let your approach stem from that trust.”

After deciding to leave Adobe, Peter obviously had choices for what he could do moving forward. In our conversations with him he made it clear that going with Agile For All felt right to him because he shares our desire to change the status quo for ourselves and for our clients. He brings a tremendous amount of knowledge about effectively scaling organizations of all sizes, and is well known as an Agile thought leader — helping the rest of the Agile world learn from his experiences on a regular basis through his writings and conference presentations. In fact, you can see him at the Mile High Agile 2015 conference here in Denver on April 3, 2015.

In addition to Peter Green, two other noted Agile thought leaders are joining the Agile For All team: Jake Calabrese, formerly of Agility Street, and Henry Dittmer, formerly of Swift Ascent.

You can see Jake’s bio on our site here so I won’t go into those details. Instead, let me tell you why I’m excited Jake is joining the team. I’ve known Jake since 2007 and have been more impressed with him as I’ve learned more about him over time. He has reinvented himself at least 10 times since 2007, and each change has been positive. He loves learning new things and integrating them into what he does. He is passionate about coaching people to be the best they can be, and that’s what we try to do every single time we work with a client.

Like Jake, Henry’s bio is here. I’ve known Henry since giving a class to his group from Avaya in 2007 and have always loved his desire to help executives understand the Agile mindset he himself had to learn over many years. His passion for communicating with each individual in a way compatible with the mindset of that person is amazing. I love watching him work. I learn something every time we are at a client together.

Why should you care about this announcement? Because by adding these three amazingly talented people, Agile For All now has more depth and breadth of experience to help clients reach their potential. Peter, Jake and Henry take vast amounts of experience from working in real companies as well as working as trainers and coaches, and they bring that knowledge to each engagement. Their knowledge and experience overlaps with the core of what Agile For All does, but also expands beyond that core in ways that help us engage a wider variety of clients. For example, Jake has done a lot of work around use of Agile outside of software development and is a speaker at the Agile and Beyond 2015 conference. Henry is well versed in systems thinking as applied to organizations and the flow of value creation, especially from the management and executive level. Peter brings a lot of experience around scaling Agile implementations within large companies and will be helping us create a course for the new Scrum Alliance Scaling Added Qualification. We could have done each of these things prior to Peter, Jake and Henry joining us, but with their added expertise and experience we can reach new heights in these areas.

I am personally excited about these great new additions to our team. Agile For All continues to exceed every expectation I had when I founded the company back in 2008. I’m blessed to be working with such awesome people!

Leave a comment to say “Hi” to Peter, Jake and Henry (and maybe share a story about them!). Also be sure to let us know how we can help you on your quest toward Making Agile a Reality^® for you and your organization!