Brian Voller

Overview -  

Born and raised outside of Chicago, IL; attended college in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Germany. Strong interest in the sciences, mathematics, engineering, travel, history, literature and other cultures from a young age.

Studied German overseas 1981-82, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany. Fully fluent in German - speak, read, write at college level.

Graduated with BBA in Marketing and Finance from University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1987. Recognized as student leader by Dean of Students for work with international student association called AIESEC. Represented University at National Conference on International Competitiveness 1986.

First career in International Market Research, working for GfK AG, Nuremburg, Germany, 1988-93, specializing in longitudinal consumer studies, life-style based consumer market segmentations and social trend analysis. Lived in the old city a few blocks from the "Burg". Fully bilingual.

Along the way opened my own market research consultancy, dabbled in digital imaging, ran a web-design firm and worked for a small IT consultancy before moving to an IT role with a Fortune 500 firm, Corporate Express, later purchased by Staples, Inc. Now working for DaVita Kidney Care, Inc in Denver.

Agile Experience

I have a bit over 10 years of experience working in Agile environments. Initially I gathered experience at Corporate Express (CE) in various roles on our Agile ecommerce team, principally as a senior Test Architect and Business Analyst for our custom in-house B2B platform. We served ~400k users across ~40k accounts, writing at our peak ~50k transactions or ~$8M per day. The work was largely project-oriented rather than product or capability-oriented, as we were transitioning from a traditional project-based iterative SDLC approach, loosely based on RUP.

During our Agile transformation, two projects stand out: one was a large-scale multi-year effort to re-platform our ecommerce suite onto BEA using multiple scrum teams, about 80 analysts, developers and testers in all; the other a narrowly defined 5-way integration to extend our merchandise product-line to include custom print products, where every order line represented a new SKU, something our legacy systems couldn’t handle at the time. The first represents my first experience with scaled Agile; the latter an outstanding example of a small, elite, cross-functional team doing extraordinary work on a tight schedule and exceeding expectations at every turn.

In 2010 I earned my CSM and built my first Scrum team from scratch. This team was part of a very large-scale effort involving multiple teams using a mix of traditional and Agile approaches. We were charged with building automated data migration tools to move legacy CE B2B ecommerce customers to the legacy Staples B2B systems following their acquisition of CE in 2008. We ran 2-week sprints tied to the larger project release process.

My core team of developers and testers sat in Broomfield, supplemented by IBM contractors in NYC and some ETL developers in India. Differences in the data models between the CE and Staples OMS systems caused considerable challenges. I served as team lead, technical SME and ScrumMaster for over two years. We moved the aforementioned ~40k accounts in nine waves over ~24 months, while retaining all of our customers and implementing an automated communications tool using a salesforce.com front end to keep our sales reps and users informed of progress. During this time, I also earned my CSPO in order to better guide our product owners.

Over the course of the next few years, I turned my attention increasingly to scaling Agile under the special circumstances of our salesforce.com team. Our salesforce.com instance served ~6000 users across 22 business units, but there was no appetite to fund multiple development teams. Resolving conflicting priorities across business owners was a major challenge. Eventually we hit upon a system where we gathered the 22 business units into four portfolio groups, each represented to the dev team by a proxy product owner under the business-side director, supported by a solution architect. This is the inverse of the more typical scaling challenge involving multiple dev teams and a single product vision, as described by SAFe, LeSS and other scaling approaches.

We created a “story-point economy” whereby development capacity funded for the year and concentrated into a single dedicated team could be divvied up across roadmaps proposed by each of the respective portfolio groups and their steering committees. Incoming requests were reviewed in an on-going 2-step process and budgeted against the respective capacity budget. On the development side, we ran a ScrumBan allocating 85% of available capacity for planned work, and the balance for unplanned work. We used a 3-week cadence with on-demand off-cycle deployments as needed. Customer Support was fully integrated into our regular meeting cadence, contributing to a fully aligned DevOps approach linking ideation, design, development, deployment and support into a single Center of Excellence for all business capabilities around prospecting, B2B sales, and related activities. Here, the core dev team sat primarily in Broomfield, with a near shore team in Mexico City to augment staff. Total CoE staffing amounted to just 25 people.

This approach was wildly successful, so much so that after two years I was promoted and asked to implement something similar at the division level. Staples is a big place with a wide variety of teams and circumstances. I was the only division-level Agile Program Manager in the company, with a “dotted line” to the Enterprise Agile Task Force. I coordinated closely with that group while bringing my 20-some teams up to speed on Agile practices over the course of this past year. Doing so involved establishing shared metrics and practices where possible and adjusting as necessary.

Today my focus is on the full end-to-end “concept-to-cash” flow organized around business capabilities, as this best leads to successful Agile transformations in my view. Recent LeSS and SAFe certifications support my experience.

-March 2018