“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~ Isaac Newton
Like many, my career has been both challenging and incredibly fulfilling. I have been fortunate enough to work during two major technical industrial revolutions. I enjoy pulling from my 20 plus years of experience in software engineering, leadership, and digital transformation and sharing experiences and learning. Therefore, I am devoted to spreading this message through Rethinking Your Understanding.
As I enter the final phase of my professional journey, I am passionate about today’s challenges and the technical community. I am eager to give back to the community by volunteering my time and expertise, making a positive impact, and continuously learning and growing my skills.
Here are a few examples of the ways that I enjoy engaging with you, your organization, or team.
- Speaking engagements and corporate presentations:
- see below (Industry leadership conversations)
- Senior Leadership round table discussions
- Digital transformation consulting and conversations
- connecting software engineering to business outcomes
- change, culture, and mindset
- architecture and team design
- optimizing efficiencies
- team design
- delivery practices
- leveraging value stream management, flow and realization
- metrics and team performance
- technology leadership and management
- Coffee calls
- bounce ideas off of each other
- trends in the industry
- experiences
- Mentoring: I have promoted, developed, and mentored many first-time engineering managers. I enjoy mentoring and sharing my experiences and learning.
- new managers must understand that this is a career shift more than a progression.
- being a great engineer and leading an engineering team are two different competencies; each requires very different skills and strengths. Knowing this is important, the transition may only work for some technology team members.
- going into management requires a shift in mindset. You should be passionate about investing in and putting your team members first. You see reward through their growth and successes.
- if you go to management, please remember you are still a great engineer. You do not give up on your intuition and ability to contribute advice as an engineer.
- Check out my post on the shift to management and let me know what you think.
“Leadership behaviour will make it or break it.” ~ Jonathan Smart
Industry Conversations
Since 2021, I have appreciated the opportunity to discuss my and other organizations’ leaders’ digital experiences, transformations, contexts, challenges, and practices. Some of these talks, presentations, and discussions include:
2023
- Case Study – Published November 2023: Planview: Parchment – Rethinking Metrics: A Journey from Legacy Measures to Team Success
- Case Study – Published October 2023: VSM Story from Flowtopia 2023: Parchment – Inspecting Value Streams
- Public Speaking: Flowtopia Conference, live in-person event, Las Vegas Aria Resort and Casino (Value Stream Management).
- INSPECT: Phil Clark, Parchment/Workshop with Broadcom: Lance Knight
- Public Speaking: Planview – 2023 Accelerate Global Customer Conference, virtual conference event.
- Parchment – Rethinking Metrics: A Journey from Legacy Measures to Team Success.
- Leadership Round-table:
- Replacing Agile Leadership with technical members, combining agile leadership responsibilities into fewer roles.
- Using AI to replace to agile leadership.
- Thank you to Apurva Xxxx and Phil Clark for the suggestion.
- Round-table: Project to product.
- Leadership Round-table: M&A strategies and SOPs
- How and when to integrate systems to achieve 1+1=3.
- How do you manage data when you haven’t yet integrated acquisitions?
- Is Global Business Operations a centralized function or in silos?
- Standardizing process first. Heavy customization in a SaaS product is indicative of a problem.
- Profitability expectations from your PE firms, has your investment thesis changed due to market conditions? Rule of 40 – Swing between growth & margins Growth at all costs is now health at all costs
- How are you using AI, internally, externally, etc.
2022
- Leadership Round-table: competition for talent; skill set mismatch; burnout; driving and managing change.
- Round-table: Key themes from Team Topologies. For those organizations on a transformation journey – Value Streams, Team structures, Team cognitive load, Metrics for team structures, and Platform teams.
- Private by invitation round-table – Cynefin framework with Dave Snowden.
- Round-table: Metrics that matter:
- What metrics are key to your organization? Examples: ROI, cost of delivering IT services, cost of resources, business value related to digital transformation, online apps availability, production incidents, utilization rates, user experience ratings, social media activity, downloads
- Do your metrics communicate how IT is enabling critical business/mission outcome success?
- Discuss challenges, hurdles and barriers to creating IT metrics which matter to executive leadership.
- Share lessons learned which others will benefit from and identify best practices which you can readily apply in your organization.
- Round-table with Gene Kim. Gene Kim’s top takeaways from the 2022 DevOps EU Summit and open discussion forum.
2021
- CEO conference, panel member: “How Leadership Impacts Transformation Success.”
- Local Transformation Leader of the Year: Listen in quarterly as nominees and other Arizona business leaders collaborate and share transformation best practices and experiences.
- Digital Transformation: continued discussion about your organization’s specific objectives, measurable benefits, timelines, and communication.
- Hiring in a tight labor market; we are experiencing a war for talent again. How do we compete for the best and brightest?
- Focus on the growing prevalence of “change fatigue“, measuring value, and Scaled Agile (SAFe) with Dean Leffingwell.
- Round-table with Gene Kim.
- Focus on OKRs and accelerating the flow of business value.
- Peer exchange around technical debt and its severe impact on the health of the business. With technical debt estimated to cost companies up to $85 billion annually, the time has come to make it a priority agenda point in the boardroom.
- Driving 496% ROI with Tasktop Viz (Value Stream Management and Flow Metrics).
- Effective OKRs: Focusing on Outcomes and Finding Flow.
- Round-table with Gene Kim. A confidential, invitation only, and interactive session includes an open discussion and peer exchange around some of the key themes and learning from DevOps Enterprise Summit US 2021.
- How Value Stream Management complements your Product development.
- Lightning talk on the topic of how measuring the performance of people impacts your outcomes, after which we’ll continue the theme with a Lean Coffee session.
We all come from different experiences, let’s talk.