Andrew Whaples

My name is Andy Whaples and I am an experienced Agile Coach based in Portland, Oregon. For me the Agile movement at its heart has been a liberation movement, changing the processes, practices and cultures that are maladaptive to creative, collaborative work. My first exposure to Agile practices was in 2004, using Extreme Programming(XP) methods as a young software engineer. Unfortunately at that time XP was not aligned with my employer’s heavyweight waterfall processes, siloed organizational structure, and distributed resource pool. After struggling in this environment for several years I finally gave up on trying to use XP and I lost touch with the Agile movement, and with my love of software development, for a time. Instead I decided to join the ranks of project and team management, and several years later in 2009, now a pure-bred MBA and PMP with the scars from several large project implementations, I was re-introduced to Agile practices in the form of Scrum. Seeing Scrum in action for the first time I immediately realized just how ineffective or lacking many of the waterfall and traditional management tools I had been learning to master really were. Instead I could see how Agile principles and the Scrum methodology were encouraging the intense collaboration, customer focus, adaptive learning, and alignment between work and passion that were needed for program success. My love affair with software development as a craft was reignited, and from that point forward my career has been focused on studying, doing, and teaching Agile methodologies so that teams can achieve their state of awesome.