Kane Mar

April 2012 – April 2012 (1 month) Wellington, New Zealand

- A short history of software engineering and Agile software development.

Comments from the conference feedback:
"An inspirational speaker - hope is eternal."
"Good speaker, very interesting topics, engaged audience and entertaining."
"Really good session 'best so far'."

And my favourite comment:
"Uncomfortable chairs!"

2011 – 2011 (less than a year) Sydney, Austalia

- PANEL: Software engineering is a dead craft
- Agile Team Games

2010 – 2010 (less than a year) Melbourne, Australia

- Working with Continuous Deployment to reduce cycle time
- Agile Team Games

Nonprofit; 1-10 employees; Nonprofit Organization Management industry

2010 – 2010 (less than a year) Shanghai, China

Scrum and XP: Myths, truths and how to do it.

2009 – 2009 (less than a year) Sydney, Australia

- Agile team games

Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry

September 2005 – October 2008 (3 years 2 months) North American

I am an Agile trainer (Certified Scrum Trainer) and coach (Certified Scrum Coach) specializing in Scrum and Extreme Programming. I have been working exclusively with Agile software development teams since 2001 and have worked with clients such as QPass, Microsoft, Capital One, Progressive, and TransCanada Pipelines. My focus is on creating highly performing Agile teams that are delivering high quality software and maximizing business value.

I am also experienced in guiding organizations that are transitioning to an Agile organization. This includes preparing senior management and business partners for changes resulting from the introduction of Scrum.

Prior to my work with Agile software development, I had 10 years of experience as a developer and project manager for Waterfall and RUP projects working with Java, Smalltalk, C, SQL and PL/SQL. My recent technical interests have turned towards Ruby primarily because of its similarlity to Smalltalk.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry

January 2006 – January 2008 (2 years 1 month) Redmond, WA

I worked periodically as a vendor within Microsoft at their Redmond, WA campus for a number of years. During this time I worked closely with teams in their Business Intelligence unit to help them adopt Scrum. This gave me unique insight how is structure and works. My responsibilities included Scrum training, education of ScrumMasters and Product Owners and hands-on coaching of the project team.

Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry

January 2006 – September 2006 (9 months) Seattle, WA

QPass had been unable to deliver software for about 2 years, and had entered into a state of 'Analysis-Paralysis'. Their senior management determined that they needed anther approach and asked me to help their teams adopt Scrum and to transition the organization. I coached four teams, acted as ScrumMaster and helped educate senior management about some of the cultural and organizational changes they should anticipate.

QPass released version 2 of their software in September of 2006, after a short 9 months.

Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry

February 2001 – September 2005 (4 years 8 months)

As an Agile Project Manager, Coach and Mentor much of my work has involved organizational change, behavioral change, and coaching both management and staff. My responsibilities have included ensuring the smooth operation of the project teams, conducting seminars and educating the client on Agile best practices, ensuring that Agile practices are followed, project management, and resolving issues.

Clients that I worked with while at ThoughtWorks include TransCanada Pipelines, MetLife Insurance, Progressive Insurance, and Capital One.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; COF; Financial Services industry

September 2004 – June 2005 (10 months) Richmond, VA

ThoughtWorks has been be engaged at Capital One from about September of 2004. Capital One launched an Agile Pilot engagement. A portfolio of projects were identified by Capital One to implement Agile practices. TW engaged with the pilot teams and advised them in the implementation of Agile practices. The Agile practices adopted were weighted more towards the realm of Project Management, Analysis and Testing and not as much towards development practices.

My responsibilities at Capital One consisted of advising client management on cultural and organizational changes in addition to teaching the customer and BAs to write user stories, developers to elicit acceptance criteria, testers to begin using acceptance criteria to test parts of a system and the team plan and deliver functionality in iterations. As a part of mentoring the various pilot teams I developed a coaching roadmap. The roadmap outlined a plan in order to get Capital One Associates trained in Agile practices, and was subsequently rolled out across the organization as their model roadmap. I mentored five successful projects (3 at any one time) while at Capital One.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; PGR; Insurance industry

2004 – 2004 (less than a year)

Progressive was migrating a large legacy Smalltalk application to a .Net platform. This project was expected to take four project teams 18 months to complete. Two project teams had been established and consideration was benign given to the third project team.

Progressive was using the xPS project as a way to introduce Agile methodologies into the organization. As a consequence much of my work involved organizational change, behavioral change, and coaching both management and staff. I was responsible for 6 ThoughtWorkers and about 20 client staff. My responsibilities included ensuring the smooth operation of the project teams, conducting seminars and educating the client on Agile best practices, ensuring that Agile practices are followed, coaching project management, and resolving issues.

Public Company; 501-1000 employees; MHE; Publishing industry

2004 – 2004 (less than a year) Monterey, CA

McGraw-Hill CTB were responsible for producing online testing for K12 schools. The E-learning project aimed to integrate testing frameworks, source questions and original artwork into their online application database. This involved building integration components, automation of validation routines, and issue resolution of source data.

As Agile Project Manager I was responsible for managing three Thougworks staff and 2 client staff. I was responsible for coordinating the team activities, prioritization of business requirements, issue resolution and coordinating with the client project management. I guided the project through development, testing and rollout into production.

Privately Held; 10,001+ employees; Insurance industry

January 2003 – May 2003 (5 months)

Nationwide Financial were interested in updating their in-house software development methodology (SDM) to include modern iterative software delivery methodologies such as RUP and Agile. I was tasked with devising and creating the material for Agile methodologies. This included descriptions of Agile practices, high level summaries of work products, examples and working templates.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; MET; Insurance industry

March 2002 – December 2002 (10 months) Greenville, SC

I was the Agile Project Manager responsible for overseeing the implementation of a common customer information system for the institutional line of business. This application supports information for over 20 million individuals an 30 thousand organizations. It leverages MQ and custom software for initial data load and real-time synchronization with several legacy systems and presents an ACORD compliant Web Services interface that will eventually be used by over 60 front-end applications. Technologies include Java/J2EE in a WebSphere environment, UDB (formerly DB2), TopLink and MQ.

I was responsible for coordinating and directly overseeing the activities of 11 ThoughtWorkers and 9 client staff members. My responsibilities also included:
- Introducing and implementing Agile best practices and software development processes.
- Providing direction and focus to the team, though all phases of SDLC
- Work estimation, planning and tracking
- Issue resolution, and Risk mitigation
- Negotiations with the client regarding project scope, functionality, budgeting and staffing.
- Reviewing invoices and billing
- Reporting to senior management, including formally presenting deliverables and status reports
- Mentoring staff, including performance appraisals, recommendations, and feedback
- Interacting and coordinating project related dependencies with other project teams

Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; TRP; Oil & Energy industry

February 2001 – January 2002 (1 year) Calgary, AL

I acted as Agile Project Manager (“Scrum Master”) for a high profile, high-risk Land Information Management project. This project had failed several times before, and I was tasked with turn the project around. I was responsible for introducing Scrum to the team, and for ensuring successful delivery of the complex business application. The project team was delivering useful functionality to the business within 6 weeks of inception, and has delivered more usable functionality than any previous team after only three months.

My responsibilities as part of this project included, but were not limited to:
- Leading a team of 6 ThoughtWorkers, and 5 client staff
- Providing direction and focus throughout the SDLC
- Introducing Agile Methodologies (Scrum) to the project team
- Estimating, Planning and Scheduling work efforts
- Issue Resolution and Risk Mitigation
- Presenting deliverables and status reports to senior management

Partnership; 10,001+ employees; Accounting industry

1996 – 2001 (5 years)

In my time with PWC I was held several different positions including Software Project Manager, Acceptance Testing Manager, Team Lead and Snr. Software Engineer as part of the Land Information NZ (LINZ) project.

As Project Manager, I was responsible for leading/managing a team of 15 PwC and 4 contracting staff in the construction of the CRS1 Cadastral, Geodetic, Electoral and Spatial display subsystems.

In addition, I was responsible for the delivery of several major deliverables, such as the Receive and Authorise Survey High Level design, and subsequent detailed designs. These deliverables have been important in defining the scope and extent of the Survey construction project.

Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; NZT; Telecommunications industry

1991 – 1992 (1 year)