Sean Scott

Sean Scott has worked in IT for over 25 years. The first few years were spent in software sales where he specialized in helping his customers find the right software to solve their business problems. That naturally led him into continuing to support them by installing and customizing their software. Customization of MS Access, MS Excel, and Lotus 1-2-3 were common requests. After several years of desktop development, he moved into desktop support. This gave him a new avenue to help his customers solve their business problems. He was able to make himself available to help them through issues blocking their progress in solving their own problems while still being available to develop full solutions to those clients that did not have the time or resources to solve their own business problems.

After several years of desktop support and light development work, he moved into a full-time development role building Web sites and Web-based applications using ASP and VB Script. He led the development effort for most of his clients and often performed the business analysis and engineering design work, in addition to development and team management. During one of his Web development projects, an ActiveX control was needed. Sean volunteered to learn Visual Basic and write the control. This led to more and more Visual Basic work as time went on. Eventually, leading him to move out of ASP development and into full-time Visual Basic development. Agile development practices were starting to become popular during the time he was doing Visual Basic development. The Agile Manifesto had just been released and several articles were available that discussed the merits and warnings associated with moving into an agile methodology. He studied all of the articles he could find and read several books about Agile and began moving his team into moving into an Agile methodology. After several years, he moved to another organization in a position of project manager for a learning management software company. While working at the learning management company he continued to evangelize Agile and ran as many of his project teams as agile as possible. While not yet truly Agile, these teams were as agile as possible, given the constraints of the company. A backlog of work was maintained with the help of the client, the developers worked through the backlog based upon the ordering from the client, and builds were done as often as possible so testing could be done during the sprint.

Sean made another strategic career move and landed at a national consulting firm as a project manager. During his him there, he was able to earn his Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner certifications. This gave him the tools and knowledge needed to start doing Scrum. He started with a short (six-month) project to implement a communication tool. After that project ended, he was brought back to the same client to act as a lead in one of the engineering teams. Here, he implemented Scrum for all of the projects that came into the department that required a Scrum-sized team. After doing Scrum “under the table” for a few years, he was pleased when the company decided to adopt Scrum as their official development methodology. Sean wrote a booklet that gave an overview of Scrum and provided it to his client and consulting firm. It has been distributed to interested parties over the last few years.

He is currently working as a full-time manager in application security and as an instructor at the University of Missour-St. Louis in the graduate school of business.