Ken Schlorf
My certifications
About
Ken Schlorf
My path to greater agility follows that of many others. I started as a BA whose team decided to try the Scrum framework. I volunteered to be Scrum Master because I had a significant amount of project management experience and was also working my way towards being a Six Sigma Green Belt. I liked that type of coordination work and was anxious to learn new things.As a Scrum Master, I quickly came to realize that instead of coordinating the work myself, I would be helping others coordinate their work by utilizing the Scrum framework and values as well as the Agile values and principles. The stark differences in approaches of waterfall and Agile towards people and the work were significant. Agile clearly made more sense to me. I got certified as a Scrum Master at my first opportunity and can thank Angela Johnson and Christian Antoine for their support in those early days.
After realizing that the area I worked in was not going to quickly improve their ways of working, I sought an alternative position in a company that had a greater interest in following and living the Agile values and principles.
I progressed through a handful of teams as a Scrum Master – increasing in complexity – and eventually kicked off 3M’s Dojo as a Dojo Coach. Modeled after Target’s Dojo, we conducted 3–6-week engagements with teams to help them work in a way that followed the Agile values and principles. The teams were very successful (as measured in a variety of ways from team happiness to improved customer outcomes). The Dojo was so successful that management wanted to bring every team associated with a billion-dollar project through the Dojo. This meant speeding up the teams and cutting the time they spent in the Dojo to one week. This speed came at a cost as many teams we not prepared before, and their learnings didn’t stick well afterwards.
As part of my career growth, I have sought to move beyond training and become a better coach. I have ICAgile certifications and apply much of what I have learned on a daily basis as I lead a group of about a dozen trainers and coaches from across the globe.
Though I am not a huge fan of SAFe, I know the framework and can work within it to accomplish corporate goals while focusing on the Agile Values and Principles and well as the Scrum Values. I began to learn about SAFe while helping 3M IT adopt the SAFe framework by focusing on the creation and training of 3M IT's first RTEs. I took that knowledge and applied them to the RTE role within GDIT for government contracts.
Experience and services
-
Career history
- 2023-02-06 - present - General Dynamics Information Technology (Release Train Engineer)
- 1999-01-15 - 2007-09-28 - Securian Financial Services (Sr. Business / Operations Analyst)
- 2007-10-01 - 2008-05-30 - Woodbury Financial Services (Product Manager)
- 2008-07-01 - 2009-11-20 - Baptist Haiti Mission (Mechanic / Database Design)
- 2010-10-08 - 2012-12-31 - Woodbury Financial Services (Business Analyst / Data Steward)
- 2013-02-11 - 2016-04-05 - Thrivent Financial (Sr. Business Analyst)
- 2016-04-11 - 2017-06-16 - ThreeBridge / 3M (Scrum Master / Agile Coach)
- 2017-06-19 - 2020-04-01 - 3M (Agile Coach)
- 2020-04-01 - 2023-02-03 - 3M (Central Coaching Services Leader)