Currently I am available - thanks for stopping by

Some people work in this challenging and frustrating space we call "agile project management" and never actually get to experience what it is like to see everything fall into place, resulting in an almost exponential improvement in solution delivery, out-sized sales growth and market share capture. For me, it happened on my very first agile project. 

In fact, I can confidently state that I know exactly what it takes to create a highly successful "Agile Transformation" because I have personally played an integral part in three of them.

 In truth, the term "agile transformation" is better expressed as "agile adoption," but we'll use "agile transformation" as it is the term most widely used today.

1. Power Advocate (2009-2012; now a part of Wood Mackenzie)

2. Commonwealth Financial Network software division (2014-2019; spun off, now known as Advisor 360)

3. CaseNet (2019; spun off by Centene Corp. in 2020 and later merged into Zyter | TruCare)

Each of these success stories is described below as a case study. My experiences leading up to each of these successful outcomes had a direct bearing on how I handled my role.

Agile transformation case study #1: Power Advocate (now Wood Mackenzie), Boston, MA
 

In August 2007, immediately following a 10-month Business Analyst contract with JP Morgan Chase in downtown Boston, I started a memorable journey at Power Advocate, now a part of Wood Mackenzie. This is where my agile journey began. I was hired originally as a Senior Business Analyst (employee no. 42) to elicit requirements and craft specifications documents in a waterfall system. Power Advocate was a ten-year old power industry consultancy with aspirations to launch a "killer-app" SaaS platform to revolutionize the way our power industry clients conducted business. Burning cash each quarter, we truly had the excitement and vibe of a start-up.

Power Advocate's fledgling "Intelligence" platform aimed to answer critical questions haunting C-suite leaders at every power generation company. The flagship module was a procurement solution titled "Sourcing Intelligence." We competed head-to-head with Ariba, then the leader in that space. The rest of the platform vision included feature modules like Spend Intelligence, Contract Intelligence, Market Intelligence and Supplier Intelligence. I elicited requirements and wrote specification documents for the latter three modules.
 

My pièce de résistance was an intricate "commodity-roll-up" dashboard for the Market Intelligence module that would essentially answer highly difficult questions confronting the average Executive VP of Finance. For example, one question might be: "How much it should cost to build a new natural gas-fired power generation plant?"
 

Given the fact that we assiduously tracked 800 different commodities (including labor) and we knew from our Sourcing Intelligence module what every large stand-alone component should cost, we had everything needed to provide a pretty good answer.
 

Because our direct competitors were larger and better capitalized, Dan Sullivan and William Conklin (the president and CTO respectively) made the decision in early 2009 to make the leap from waterfall to agile. They had three stated goals: 1) Increase market share by delivering our solutions faster; 2) Reduce the variability and increase predictability for every new feature proposed; and 3) Reduce the defect rate by 95%.
 

Version One of Seattle was contracted to guide our agile transformation, with Mike Tardiff, a Massachusetts native, serving as our Agile Coach. The Version One SOW covered six months and Mike stood up four agile teams (one at a time) within 90 days. Initially I was asked to serve as a Proxy-Product Owner for the Market Intelligence team because the Product Owner for that newly-formed team was temporarily out of commission. I quickly transitioned to the role of Scrum Master upon his return.

With 19 Java developers spread across 4 newly-formed Dev teams, every developer adopted Test Driven Development. Every team adopted Continuous Integration. As one of two newly-minted scrum masters, I served at least two teams concurrently. With the support of leadership, Lean-Agile practices were adopted across nearly every aspect of the Power Advocate organization. Dan and Bill attended almost every sprint review for all four development teams and were fully engaged during Q and A. 

Delivery of valuable solutions to our clients and prospects soon accelerated in frequency while code quality skyrocketed. Every module could pull strategic data from the other modules, which required that we become adept at getting out in front of cross-team dependencies. Each new module rollout was a success, and our SaaS sales team started winning routinely against the big boys. Soon we started posting big wins in the oil and gas industry.
 

Beginning in 2011, annual SaaS revenues grew by 40% on average for five consecutive years.

The agile transformation was so successful that Verisk Analytics (VRSK-NASDAQ) acquired PowerAdvocate in late 2017 for $200 million plus $80 million in milestone payments, for a total of $280 million. Everyone who had stock options experienced at least a 1500% return on the exercise cost of their options. Power Advocate was subsumed by Wood Mackenzie, a 2012 Verisk acquisition. 

In this business, once a platform is built, you need fewer teams and fewer scrum masters. I exercised my stock options and moved on. 

Agile transformation case study #2: Commonwealth Financial Network, Waltham, MA

The second and arguably most successful agile transformation that I was a part of took place at Commonwealth Financial Network. Commonwealth Financial was already an esteemed broker-dealer. But in the IT department improvement was needed. The waterfall-to-agile transformation had begun in 2013. I joined in May 2014, assigned to serve the Preferred Portfolio Services Operations team, the heart of Commonwealth's portfolio accounting activities. The lesson immediately learned was that it is hard for employees at a successful firm to willingly adopt more efficient IT practices. After a rocky start, the agile transformation was an unqualified  success story. Every operational KPI and every OKR measurement related to Commonwealth's SaaS platform dramatically improved four years in a row.  During that period, a large number of successful independent financial advisors quit their existing firms to join Commonwealth, resulting in more assets under management (AUM), higher revenues and higher profits. 

The competitive advantage of the Commonwealth SaaS platform became common knowledge throughout the wealth management industry, which only encouraged more advisors to consider joining Commonwealth. As a result of this clear competitive advantage, Massachusetts Mutual Life (MML), a 140-year-old firm four times the size of Commonwealth Financial Network, paid an estimated $30 million to Commonwealth to gain an enterprise software license to enable their 16,000 financial advisors to gain access to Commonwealth's advanced SaaS platform. This was easily the largest single revenue event in the history of Commonwealth Financial Network.

Prior to the licensing agreement, the entire Commonwealth software development organization (six scrum teams and all of their immediate stakeholders) was spun off to form a new company called Advisor 360. Both Commonwealth and Massachusetts Mutual became "clients" of Advisor 360.  The birth of Advisor360 and this massive transaction are the direct result of the highly successful adoption of Lean-Agile practices at Commonwealth Financial Network from 2012 through 2018.

Case study #3: CaseNet (then a subsidiary of Centene Corp.), Bedford, MA

My third agile transformation success story involves CaseNet, a subsidiary of Centene (NYSE-CNT) which was subsequently spun off after this project concluded. That six-month gig involved the massively successful re-write of TruCare, a legacy app then supporting the healthcare delivery for 22 million Medicaid patients across 40 states.

There were four development teams but no scrum masters and very little agile program structure  in place when I joined CaseNet.  The four teams were not in alignment and they were behind schedule. As one of two scrum masters hired for this project, I served two scrum teams concurrently beginning on my first day. With the support of Centene's leadership, we instituted a complete agile program that included every scrum ceremony. We emphasized paired programming, TDD and holding regular sprint demos for all stakeholders. We used Scaled Agile tactics to identify cross team dependencies up front to avoid costly re-work.

After my six-month contract ended, the four scrum teams coasted to project completion on-time and under budget, prompting Centene to make the new Tru-Care solution the centerpiece of their national Medicaid operation going forward. I moved on immediately to Tufts Health Plan for a fresh six-month contract.

Once the Tru-Care re-write was complete, Centene spun off CaseNet completely. As a result, Centene is saving millions of dollars in software license fees.

Following CaseNet, I have worked for five additional firms where I have served as a senior scrum master or agile coach:

1. Tufts Health Plan (six-month contract on-site pre-Covid)

2. Monster Worldwide (three years fully remote - now known as CareerBuilder - Monster)

3. NextEra Energy (six-month contract onsite)

4. ADT Solar (81 days fully remote) ADT Solar was shuttered by parent company ADT.

5. Walt Disney Experiences (six-month contract - remote)

In all, I have served over 40 teams for 11 firms, mostly in or near Boston, the birthplace of Scrum. In addition to three "long term" FTE roles, I have eagerly accepted a variety of six-month contract assignments. Why take all of these six-month contracts?  I have always been curious. I like discovering what makes teams succeed and what holds them back. I like creating value where things are in a state of underperformance. 

The three long-term stints were deeply enriching thanks to the friendships I made, but there is no better agile education than personally experiencing the way different teams seated at different firms approach the mystifying challenge of “being agile” as opposed to just “doing agile.”