My Motive

You know someone if you understand their motive. Therefore, let’s start with the driving force in my professional life as a coach:

It’s about you, not me. Bringing you forward is my goal.

My Stance on Coaching

The coachee is the center of coaching, not the coach.

Every success finally rests with the coachee, not the coach. Every organizations, every persons, and every team does have a personality on their own. Coaching them indifferently would only serve confusion and failure. Even as they are different, there are commonalities. The challenging interplay between individuality and commonalities in each and every coaching is making my day for more than 15 years.

Long-term success is only achieved if no coach is needed - intriguingly, during periods a coach is needed for leading-by-example, explaining, and guidance for self-learning. The more future-proof move is to teach and explain. Human mind’s are masters of pattern recognition, providing patterns and ideas how to angle and solve the puzzle of challenges, constrains and needs, severs the coachee and the organization better than me stepping in.

I see my role in a continued coaching position. At the beginning as a guide, then as a co-worker, later as a sparring partner to train your thoughts.

Shine in Face of Your Environment

What the fuzz about Agile, Scrum, and LeSS?

Let’s face it: the world is changing faster than before. Every change is unique and yet, some ideas to cope with frequent changes prevail.

One simple idea is: don’t plan too long into the future, but plan so you do have a clue when you need to adapt. This simple and yet powerful idea is central to all agile methodologies. For small, you find this in Scrum; for large scale, you find this in LeSS.

If the idea to pave the solution is so simple, why adopt a framework at all? You are right, you may not. The benefit of reading up a framework is about the learnings. Every framework was tested in time, some vanished, some prevailed, and some progressed.

Benefiting from those learnings is great – but only if you learn and not copy! Therefore, don’t accept a framework blindly, but be open for learning and understand when which part of those framework gives you a learning-leverage.

Vita

I studied computer science with special interest in complex systems, knowledge based systems, robotics and computer aided support in medicine at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. My studies let me also towards the topic of Entrepreneurship and organizing work.

I concluded my studies with the continuation of exploring the world of enterprise spin-offs and complex hardware and software product development. In this period, I co-seated a research position at the university, a research position at Carl Zeiss(a large German corporation), and as a team lead, software architect and developer. But the truth is, I continued exploring and learning complex adaptive systems - in real live.

Here, Scrum entered the scene for me. It changed the ideas of coping with complex adaptive system (product development) and equally complex adaptive system (people). Within our corporate spin-off, we had the luxury and support to experiment with this new concept. It resolved many struggles and only open limited new ones. One of these new limited struggles, how to integrate the benefits of Scrum into the corporate world.

Before solving, I moved to a permanent position as an Agile Coach with Valtech. Some consulting engagements elicited thinking in large complex corporate structures with agile swiftness and flexibility. Transforming the learning from (small scale) Scrum to the corporate complexity and largeness, is excelled by LeSS.

I benefited from colleges, mentors, and even the framework authors in learning and understanding LeSS. But only the fire of reality teach learnings by heart. My period as coach for the BMW Group provided the necessary perspective to start real understanding. I co-authored and published the case study Huge LeSS Huge at BMW Group — Autonomous Driving reflecting some learnings of this engagement.

Some formal Qualifications

Certified LeSS Coach, LeSS-friendly Scrum Trainer, Candiate LeSS Trainer, Certified LeSS Practioner, scrum.org Scrum Trainer, Professional Scrum Master III, Professional Product Owner, AWS Solution Architect, Linux Professional, Value Requirements Decisions Delivery, SAFe Agilist, …

My Stance

• Scrum Maser supporting your teams in getting great.
• LeSS Coach and Agile Coach boosting your organization to compete with competition and build the foundation to surpass them.
• Testing verifying business needs, not only code-completness.
• Developing and Teaching hands-on Gemba.