Thomas Meier

Thomas Meier started his professional career while being an IT student. Being confronted with the rigid structures of waterfall processes, during student work placements and university courses he quickly realized the weaknesses of the traditional approaches. His thesis also covered development processes, of downsizing heavy, document-creating processes into smaller, result-oriented processes.

Early in his career he worked in waterfall managed projects and experienced the waterfall weaknesses right from the trenches: Not being able to respond to change requests, big bang integration, major feature development during 'system test phase' etc. To overcome those problems he joined a company internal working group to define a new process to replace the existing waterfall-based process. This resulted in a process based on the UP/RUP, which resulted in significant improvements in terms of delivery date and software quality. However there were still elements of waterfalls, and some problems have actually not been solved, such as responding to change.

Later in his career, in 2006, he took up a new job in Germany. He joined a development team that was formed to be the first Scrum team in this company. With the assistance of a proficient Scrum coach Thomas learned the high effectiveness of Scrum when introduced properly. The project later got the highest internal CMM rating among all of the company's projects.

With this background Thomas was able to lead a project as a Scrum Master in the same company, where the usage of Scrum turned out to be vital to the success of the project.

In 2009 Thomas introduced Scrum successfully to another organization in the Netherlands. There he stayed to work for three years as a Scrum Master and Head Developer to lead the software development group and also coach and mentor the team members. He and his team were able to deliver several projects successfully by employing Scrum and agile development practices.

Since 2013 Thomas is working as a Senior Consultant in a well-known, international consulting agency focussing on agile development and agile coaching. There he successfully helps internal and external development teams to adopt Scrum and agile techniques.