Josh Cole

Josh Cole lives in the beautiful seacoast of New Hampshire with his lovely wife and two amazing daughters. When he's not enjoying a family fun day by picnicking at the beach or hiking in through the state parks, he is usually playing chess, cooking without recipes, or writing.

In 1997, he graduated from high school and took the subsequent year off from academic pursuits to work at a local supermarket. That job with its minimum wage and shortage of opportunities reinforced the need for additional education to achieve his personal and career goals.

While attending a two-year college in the evenings, Josh had a plethora of odd jobs: cleaning office space, washing supermarket floors, drying slabs of wet leather, and finally, when he graduated with an Associate's Degree in Information Systems, he was stacking shelves at a large box store. These experiences instilled initiative and hard work into his character and revealed the importance of higher education in the labor force; those with degrees were in management. As a natural teacher and coach, one of Josh's goals was to manage and coach a team.

Shortly after graduation, in 2001, he started his career at Liberty Mutual Insurance in their Information Technology department. At this time he also started serving his community through his local church. This afforded him opportunities to mentor troubled youth and participate in medical mission trips to some of the most despondent communities in the Western hemisphere including Costa Rica, Panama, and Haiti (where he taught ESL). These community programs and overseas trips gave him a deep sense of gratitude for the opportunities he had been given.

As a Mainframe Operator at Liberty Mutua,l he exhibited a natural talent for process improvement and improved a laborious weekly process from six hours to thirty minutes. Noticing this aptitude, his managers gave him opportunities to assist other teams within IT. This lead to a promotion into a Release Engineer role in 2006. Being one of the first three individuals in this role, Josh was able to design the functionality and responsibilities.

In this new position, management again noticed Josh's process improvement skills, and provided specialized training that led to a green belt in Lean Six Sigma in 2008. The project to obtain this certification resulted in the elimination of over 1300 hours of rework that occurred every six months across multiple departments.

The desire to continue his career in process improvement methodology led to a lateral move to a System Analyst role, where he began using the Agile methodology to implement a security application (RSA Archer) for the entire IT organization.

The lean principles were evident in the Agile methodology, and Josh enjoyed the empowerment and goal achievement that it brought. To continue his career in this new direction, Josh accepted a promotion to a Senior Business Analyst in 2014. In this role, the agile principles continued, and he served as ScrumMaster as he helped the new team transition from waterfall to scrum.

Finding a role that aligned with his continuous improvement personality, and his servant leadership style has been very rewarding. So in an effort to continue toward his long-term goal of becoming an Agile Coach, Josh has made steps in 2017 by obtaining the Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner designations.

As a Certified Scrum Professional, Josh would like to help teams realize that work does not need to be monotonous, pointless, and void of any fun. In fact, it can be very rewarding and exciting. He believes that the Scrum is the transformative methodology to improve the output and quality of any type of work in any industry.