Sebastian Roelz

First of all, I love agile! When I look at my private life, everything is agile. If I built my house, I plan my next holiday or only when we think about what we have to buy for the evening lunch for tomorrow. At all the time we come from a big picture to smaller and smaller element till we have concrete tasks we have to fullfill. During that, we have feedback loops and improve all the things at the right time. Maybe when we decide to have our lunch with some friends at the evening instead of alone at home, we will change our plans. It´s quiet normal, isn´t it? So why we don´t live agile in our work environments? Since the beginning of my career at the late 90s as a software developer, my main focus was always to improve my work environment into a open culture with respect, openness and ownership. After 12 years as a developer I got in touch with SCRUM the first time 2010. And for me, it was amazing. Not just the framework, no. The agile principles, values, manifesto,… that was and is what I expect as the vertues in business. So I started to get a bigger mindset and experience by visiting conferences or reading agile books and blogs. My company at that time gave me the confidence to improve the internal software development process continuously by trying and adding agile values, principles, practices and tools. After two years, I switched to another company as a consultant for Application Lifecycle Management and Agile Development. For three years I adviced and trained many companies in agile mindset and practices. From time to time I worked in some of the customers teams to support them not only as a coach but also in agile testing, estimation, test driven design and so on. With a lot of agile experience, finally I recognized that my passion is to coach agile teams and I started at the beginning of an agile transition as a Scrum Master in a huge project. After the first wave of starting agile teams, I´m now one of the Agile Coaches in that project and my colleagues and me are working on the agile mindset at all levels of leadership and development.