Gregory Smith:

With 18 years of experience managing (surviving?) red haired daughters, I now believe that my lovely wife of 20 years (Kristine) and I can handle *anything*, bring it on!

Seriously though, my enthusiasm for agile and scrum goes back to one of my first software engineering professors.  She told me that "Computer Science" is a misnomer and further said that the things we do with computers had barely transitioned from black-magic to an art form and did not work with the controls used in other “hard” sciences.  She explained that efforts to make the software development process consistent and predictable were hugely successful, in that they made it consistently and predictably AWFUL.  Since that introductory lecture I've always sought to be a part of the solution to that problem.  After 15 years of attempting to be a part of that solution I whole-heartedly support Scrum, seasoned with XP practices, as the antidote for widespread CS and IT project pathologies.  Born in rural Kansas and educated at the University of Missouri, my career has taken me from Kansas City to the world's most eminent technology centers in Silicon Valley, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Bangalore and New York, some highlights follow:

·         As a CS Student I built the roughly 650^th website on the internet for UMKC in the early 90’s.

·         I Designed the web and tcp/ip components for an array of cellular monitoring devices which was among the first uses of the cellular network as a data service, SCADA-net.  

·         At Ten-TV (Technology Education Network) I helped build one of the first global content distribution networks and was awarded US Patent #6801576, “System for accessing, distributing and maintaining video content ,..”

·         I implemented a complete Scrum practice including a Scrum-Of-Scrums lightweight governance pattern at Rosetta Stone where my teams built the largest commercial international, multilingual, multicurrency Ruby on Rails web presence to date.

·         I recently completed an engagement on behalf of Thoughtworks in the Healthcare IT sector drving one of (if not the) largest international distributed Scrum practice attempted to date.

·         I am currently engaged to coach and transform teams within another very large Healthcare IT client's development pilot into an agile governance model.

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