Andrew Webster

Biography

Andrew Webster: Agile to the bone!

An Agilist since 2004, CSM since 2010, and used and taught Scrum since 2011: I'm all in!

In 2004, I saw Dr Neil Roodyn give a talk on XP in Brisbane, Queensland, to the great and the good of the Queensland IT world. He shamed us and inspired us, and it rather felt as though, from that day forward, Australia went agile.

Over the next five years, one or two of the projects I worked on did not follow any kind of agile approach - and bombed. The rest at least attempted agility, and succeeded.  How to measure success?  Everyone ended the project happy.  Happy developers, happy customers, happy management.  The last project came in $9 over budget, because I parked in the wrong deck.

In 2009 I moved to Alabama to marry. My first role, I ran my side of the project, and it went well. Then I was offered a full-time job, and joined corporate America. Excited to make a contribution, I paid for my own Certified Scrum Master, and started to learn that being successful with agility is not about what I know. It's about the culture, and if agility is a fit.

Back in Australia, it was, as pretty much everyone of note in the industry hade been in that presentation.  In Alabama, not so much.

For the four years I learned prodigious amounts about corporate politics, SDLC, methodology, process, management, and sweet tea.  And how chaos suppresses competence.

In April 2013 my wife graduated, and we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to live in San Jose.  I started working at CyberSource in Visa as a Scrum Master / Program Manager / Agile coach.

In February 2014 I joined SolutionsIQ as an Agile Coach, initially at a large payments company in the San Jose area. Absorbed into the corporate borg at that company in 2015 I soon realized that it's very hard to change the culture when the culture thinks its duty is to change you, so I left to operate as an independent coach in early 2016.