Personal Profile

Darnell BrownenEnterprise Agile Coach
San Francisco, California, Stati Uniti

I do not prescribe doing Agile only one way; rather, I feel Agile means keeping what works and intelligently change what does not. Depending on company culture and business needs, I maintain an open mind when helping choose a software delivery model. More often, I am asked to help form a hybrid software framework balancing change at a pace the people and business can take on.

From ideation to planning and delivery, I encourage Lean portfolio management through coaching product, engineering and user experience to try our a discovery and validation model to identify current, best fit solutions that customers want now. Then, design how to build 'what is currently valuable' to both the business and customer; enabling stakeholders use of their quarterly focused portfolio to make data driven decisions/trade off choices against actual work in progress. This promotes saying "no" to ideas and solutions customers do not want now or at all.

Going Agile - I help leadership understand WHY they want to change, WHAT to change, HOW Agile can help and measure progress throughout portfolio, program and team levels. Together, we find the best use of Agile practices to meet the culture, business and work environment needs. No Cookie-cutter approach!

Experience & Skills:

* I help business stakeholders translate the product roadmap into a prioritized product backlog using a variety of techniques to assess business value and risk: value streams, story mapping, prioritization techniques and splitting user stories into small, vertical slices where dependencies are easier to identify and track.

* In each engagement, I serve as a hands-on Scrum Master to mentor current Scrum Masters and aid the transition of project managers to becoming skilled Scrum Masters themselves.

* I provide Agile training in a lecture-lab format using real work in short brown bag discussions followed by doing the work together – helps knowledge stick and scale beyond me.