Kris Brietkopf

Kris Brietkopf started out as an application developer working for a small software company in the Pacific Northwest. Soon he was recruited by the largest software development company in the area to work on some internal systems that needed his special attention. During this time he worked as a Developer, Program Manager and finally as an Application Development Consultant. The ADC position required that he travel the country to visit several large companies and to assist them with their software development projects. For her health, the doctors recommended that Kris and his wife move to a dryer climate. For this reason, they left their respective corporate positions and their friends in the area and moved to the desert. Kris was now an independent consultant. He became involved with creating and/or leading projects for much smaller companies. These were companies that didn’t have sufficient in-house staff and/or the proper facility to create what they wanted on their own.

Kris is experienced with most software development processes including waterfall, RAD, XP, Kanban and Scrum. While working directly with technology has always been his passion, hes usually ends up working in a leadership or mentoring role.

He is most passionate about creating or building useful projects or tools for others. It doesn’t matter if he’s the one writing the code or facilitating and coaching teams of people who write the code. The challenge is to take the tools and some raw talent and turn visions and ideas into something tangible and useful.

The most exciting time he has ever had in his career was when he was part of a synergistic mastermind group. Kris is attracted to this kind of mastermind group and tends to attract others who are also great candidates for this kind of group. When you can take a small group of talented and driven people and focus their work together as a mastermind, you now have a powerhouse of creative potential. In the mastermind groups he has participated in, he came to see that the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. This reality becomes more and more obvious when the mastermind group gets going on its quest to materialize its objective. These groups create their projects faster and better than the standard team model.

The Agile Manifesto includes the concepts that individuals and interactions are more important than processes and tools. Customer collaboration should always come before contract negotiations. These two concepts make it possible to respond to change faster and to provide that innovative working software that everyone desires. It’s almost as if the Agile Manifesto was written with Kris in mind. That approach to delivering the projects is what comes naturally to him. He leverages these concepts every day to facilitate and to coach his teams just like a mastermind group. In so doing he builds stronger, more cohesive and more creative teams.

To add to his natural leadership abilities with Agile, Kris acquired the Certified Scrum Master designation from the Scrum Alliance. The Certified Scrum Practitioner designation is next. His work as a Scrum Master has provided the valuable hands on experience. The CSM and CSP credentials have provided a high level of industry knowledge and the tools to implement the Agile development principles.

Today Kris is an Agile coach and servant leader for multiple Scrum teams. He doesn’t personally write the code to create those projects any more. Now he creates, leads and facilitates highly motivated and collaborative mastermind teams to write the code that delivers those great projects for their customers.