Mike Sutton:

I have been in computing for 13 years, the last 9 in Java. Been agile for about as long (though without all the fancy acronyms!)

My main areas of expertise are core enterprise architecture and development, assembling and coaching/mentoring teams  to becoming hyper-performant. Recently chosen Scrum as my the basis of my agile offerings and using a pragmatic approach to injecting bits of XP and other techniques to enable my clients' teams to deliver better solutions faster. 

My recent focus has been to assist executives to improve and better recognise business value and encourage product ownership by management, coaching them in the most effective ways to communicate this the teams that are tasked with delivering the solutions. Scrum has so far been the most straightforward, common sense, yet systematic technique I have found most useful to achieve this.

I am also exploring the possibility of leveraging proven neuro linguistic programming (NLP) techniques in the softer side of software engineering - the side that requires dialogue, communnication, goal orientation and collaboration.  

By adopting and mashing Scrum/XP and NLP, I hope to help organisations overcome their limitations and exceed their own expectations with tried and proven methods of management, engineering and pschology.

Recent Articles by Mike

Case Study: October 2007 22 Oct 07

Theories are illuminating and helpful, but nothing can replace real-world experience. Each month, we'll post a real-life, ongoing case study for your consideration. The author will monitor comments and may even try the remedies that you, the Scrum community, suggest. The results of these trials will be posted as a comment to the case study.

This case study is open for discussion. Join in. 

Resources by Mike

Starting a UK Scrum Users Group
Summary of Open Space discussion about starting a UK Scrum Users Group, submitted by Mike Sutton, Wizewerx, Ltd.

Recent Comments by Mike

On Daily Standup Withdrawal in Scrum Teams
DSW is real and requires an ongoing struggle, complacency too is a major threat. To keep the discussion focused, we use post-its to represent daily deliverable tasks (all tasks break down to a set of 24 hr deliverables), so the daily scrum 3 quest...
On Case Study: October 2007
Thanks so much for the comments, I'll try and respond to (what I feel are) the key points: Team Buy-In (Ken/Mike L): I am also feeling this entire team has not bought fully into Scrum the lifestyle. I feel its a kind of waterfall or JFDI institut...
On Case Study: October 2007
UPDATE: After the new development manager came into the picture, he basically set aside the process that myself and the team (and the previous dev mgr) had forged over the course of the last year. Our process, based on Scrum for process managem...
On Keep Your Team Seeing RED
Excellent article - easy to read and understand. Though I think there are far too many acronyms already (not necessary in Scrum, but in IT generally! - there you go!). There is no mysticism to user stories - they are brilliant in their simplic...
On Destination: Agile
Excellent introduction, passes the grandma test!! Although I would have said agile is a journey rather than a destination. I like that you distinguished between process agility and engineering agility. At the highest level, agility (according to S...