Brian Link - Agile Coach, Practical Agilist

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Work Background

Practical AgilistAuthor of The Practical Agilist Guidebook + Agile Mindset based Team Assessment "Make Teams Awesome"

Jun. 2023Columbus, Ohio Metropolitan Area · HybridHow well is your team "being agile", following the modern ways of working? The Make Teams Awesome Mindset Assessment service is a self-assessment tool that draws upon a broad definition of the modern ways of thinking that includes the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. Comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement for teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com Whether you've used our assessment tool or not, once you've decided what aspects of the modern ways of working your team would like to improve, you might ask, "What should we do to start working on improving that?". The book Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide on 24 key topics of being agile (mirroring the assessment) to give easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach to tell you why the topic is important, what your team can start to do to improve in that area, a series of scrum master tips, some AI prompts to dig deeper, and a bunch of third party references to go learn more and find other experts describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com

LeanDogEnterprise Agile Coach

Feb. 2019 - Jul. 2023Buffalo, New York, United States · HybridBrian led an enterprise-wide business agility transformation at the 11th largest bank in the country, focused on creating agility from both the bottom up (300 self-sufficient, durable product teams) and from the top down, where the executive team and all divisions are advocates of agile coaching, training, and servant leadership to support the company wide transition. Leading member of the Agile CoE team and a dozen LeanDog agile coaches who led the agile transformation of 300+ teams, impacting 24,000 employees. Established the Agile CoE’s point of view and playbook of agile culture which includes the concepts, terminology and a process to educate new teams on the ways of thinking: a culture of experimentation with Design Thinking and Product Management, the regulatory and risk stakeholder engagement strategy, a team of teams scaling strategy, and the Agile Coaching cohort program. Built a culture of learning through helping to establish the central agile community as well as the Scrum Master and Product Owner communities. Then built and taught the 2-day interactive workshops for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and managers as well as the Scrum and Kanban workshops and an Intro to Agile session delivered live to the top 100 executives and 1000’s of employees in small batches. Crafted and then coached executives, managers, and teams of teams on the Agile at Scale point of view. Created a Business Agility guiding coalition of champions outside of technology to increase and accelerate agility and started the process for Lean Portfolio Management. As an Enterprise Agile Coach in the Agile CoE, I worked to change the culture, educate, coach, and train through building communities, coaching teams of teams, coaching leaders, launching new technology initiatives, and evolving the mindset to suit the needs of the bank as it grows.

Business Agility Midwest ConferenceCo-Founder

Feb. 2019 - Feb. 2020Columbus, Ohio AreaBuilding a world class business agility community in the midwestern United States comprised equally of both business and IT practitioners. Partnered with, following the format and inspired by the Business Agility Institute.

Practical AgilistEnterprise Agile Coach, Author, Speaker, and Business Agility Consultant

Sep. 2018Columbus, Ohio AreaWorking on contract currently at CareSource, establishing the Agile CoE point of view, building the Scrum Master Community, and coaching 16 Scrum Masters to build up their expertise to help guide the agile transformation. Brian is an experienced and pragmatic agile coach. He is a public speaker and the author of the upcoming book "Make Teams Awesome" (MakeTeamsAwesome.com) and of the book “Agile Misconceptions: Unlearn the Myths to Learn the Mindset” (eBook: AgileMisconceptions.com). Brian has led multiple agile transformations and is passionate about coaching agile concepts and instilling the agile mindset not just with technical teams but also with executives and management. Brian has both broad and deep experience with technology, having worked 20+ years in consulting and at both large commercial enterprise software and small startup companies.

CASEnterprise Agile Coach / Agile Portfolio Manager

Jul. 2016 - Aug. 2018Columbus, Ohio AreaAs Enterprise Agile Coach, I was responsible for maturing the business agility of the organization. Built portfolio management processes for a $72MM Technology budget for 40+ programs, and 60+ solution teams. Established a modern agile software development model through coaching and managing the software engineering and agile application delivery of the Formulations project as Delivery Manager. Established TDD/QA, Pairing and DevOps recommended standards for agile teams. Established Customer Development Program to facilitate regular feedback loops directly with development teams during delivery. Established and facilitated the Agile Community of Practice, Agile Center of Excellence and the Technology Enablement division that supported Agile, Software Engineering and Architecture CoPs and CoEs. Established, managed and delivered the first internal TechDay conference to uplift agile and software engineering skills for the organization.

Chef SoftwareSoftware Engineering Manager / Remote Agile Team Lead

Nov. 2015 - Apr. 2016RemoteAgile Team Lead and manager of a team of a dozen, remote senior software engineers. Built continuous delivery product using story mapping, deep customer integration, #noestimates, TDD, pairing, and a modern agile approach. Worked closely with Product Manager, Tech Lead, and UX Lead in an environment where no feature was built without a customer advocate.

WakeUpStartup.comCo Founder

Oct. 2011 - Dec. 2018Columbus, OHWakeup Startup is a entrepreneur-driven movement to bring together those committed to creating, building, and growing high growth companies. WUSU is a monthly morning pitch event where founders pitch their companies to a group of entrepreneurs, investors, students, faculty, and the community. The event is designed for specific and candid feedback. Held on the second Friday of every month at 7:30am at the OSU Office of Technology Commercialization, WakeUp Startup has never failed to sell out and bring over 100 investors and entrepreneurs together to network and discuss new businesses and technology before and after the pitches.

DellDirector of Software Engineering / Agile Transformation Coach

Feb. 2011 - Jul. 2015Columbus, OHCoached, trained and facilitated the transition from waterfall to agile for the business unit of 100 software engineers and established productivity metrics and standards for a dozen teams using JIRA + Portfolio. Traveled to multiple remote teams, for which I was responsible, to deliver face-to-face agile coaching to establish agile processes at Dell Software. Promoted to manage five software engineering teams at Dell, responsible for up to 40 engineers (iOS, Android, PHP and C++) ensuring the projects were delivered on-time while focusing on agile process improvements, quality, product priorities, technology architecture, integration and strategic value. Dell acquired KACE, Quest, Boomi and multiple software companies, but eventually sold the software unit

KACESoftware Engineering Senior Manager / Agile Coach

Feb. 2011 - Jan. 2013RemoteI was hired to build a remote software team for ITNinja.com from scratch. Established Agile methodology at KACE which became Dell Software. Worked with and coached the Product Manager who created the product originally as AppDeploy.com. Designed and delivered an enterprise software peer-to-peer support community, where users ask questions, blog, and share links about software challenges. Saved company $1MM a year in support costs.

Shape Up The NationCTO (Product Manager, Agile Coach, Software Engineering Manager)

Feb. 2010 - Sep. 2010Providence, Rhode Island AreaServed as Product Manager, Agile Coach, and Software Engineering Manager. Drove the technology strategy, lead the product strategy and managed the software development teams, managed and evolved the agile processes in development and QA while building an innovative and disruptive social networking product in the health and wellness space. Worked with the executive team to raise $5MM round of funding. Helped land $20MM healthcare payer client. Shape Up The Nation connects people with their trusted social network to improve their health. We work with Fortune 500 companies establish wellness programs to help their employees organize groups and intramurals, share plans and recommendations (recipes, workouts, etc.), and challenge each other to meet goals.

TooblaCTO (Product Manager, Agile Coach, Software Engineering Manager)

Feb. 2009 - Jan. 2010Columbus, Ohio AreaHired with less than a third of the funding left, I reinvented the company by creatively restructuring the technology, reducing costs, and relaunching the site. The product provided Pinterest-like features with interactive content, but only managed to gain 5000 users before we ran out of funding. Toobla was a visual social bookmarking Internet startup that raised $1.25MM. Responsible for all operations, technology, product management, staff, financials, HR and investor relations. Toobla was featured on TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, the WSJ, the front page of the Columbus Dispatch and was declared by FoxNews.com as one of the 8 technologies to watch in 2010.

Columbus Tech LifeFounder

Oct. 2008 - Oct. 2009One of the key organizers of a grassroots group fostering greater culture and passion for Social Media, Internet, Web and other cutting edge technology, ultimately leading to increased innovation. Columbus Tech Life encourages our tribe to connect, learn and grow by binding existing groups together, creating local online social spaces and organizing in person events. The Columbus TechLife organization is the third largest meetup.com technology group in the country.

Digg.comCTO (Product Manager, Agile Coach, VP of Engineering)

Apr. 2006 - Oct. 2008San Francisco Bay AreaResponsible for Engineering, Product, QA and R&D. Established Agile Product, Team, Quality, Design Thinking, and CI/CD practices. Grew and managed software engineering from 3 to 25 developers. Led technology strategy discussions at board meetings with investors. Submitted a dozen patents, named on 3. Built partnerships with executives at New York Times, Photobucket, Metacafe and managed projects with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook. While managing all technology and product aspects as Digg’s first CTO, I helped grow the company from 200K users to 4MM users and to well over 40MM monthly uniques making Digg one of the top 20 most trafficked websites in the US and top 100 in the world. Tech included PHP, MySQL, memcache.d, Python, Selenium, CruiseControl and deployed to a production, bare-metal farm of 100+ linux servers. * Responsible for all development activities; mentored the team, worked creatively to structure technical solutions, wrote product specs * Built strategic plans; prioritized initiatives; set budgets, annual goals and objectives * Established and evolved development processes and methodology as the team grew * Created Agile QA test-driven development practices, integrating QA into the development methodology * Built a continuous integration environment with Cruise Control, Selenium and Twist Also created and managed an R&D department: * Created various solutions that drive the algorithms behind Digg (diversity measures, promotion algorithm logic, duplicate detection, story clustering, recommendation systems, and user behavior modeling) * Implemented algorithms using known principles such as Jaccard coefficients, Eigenvector centrality, Locality Sensitive Hashing and clustering techniques including k-means and hierarchical dendrograms * Established R&D. Hired and managed a team of 5 research /data scientists to drive R&D experimentation

AvanadeProgram Manager

Nov. 2005 - Mar. 2006Responsible for managing the day-to-day activities of 30 individuals at Cardinal Health and managing the partnership with Accenture. Deployed an Active Directory, Single Sign-on infrastructure solution. Tracked actuals in a complex project plan, facilitated weekly all team meetings, and managed client expectations.

NSB GroupCTO

Nov. 2004 - Nov. 2005Columbus, OH and Montreal, CanadaShared .NET technical vision with clients and partners. Built world’s first working product using Microsoft’s retail-specific thin-client operating system. Created architecture committee to coordinate commonality between 57 products. Strategic architect and technology advocate for all product lines and enterprise solutions. Responsible for articulating the architectural strategy, product interoperability, and describing the vision for leveraging Microsoft .NET in the role of Technology Advocate and .NET Evangelist. Responsible for the relationship with Microsoft and for six software solutions which comprised NSB’s Connected Retailer suite of software which provides an integrated technology solution for retailers. NSB was one of the top five software providers in the retail software industry.

Centric ConsultingSenior Architect

Sep. 2004 - Nov. 2004Worked to help drive business development, designed and architect systems, focused on the Microsoft relationship and key member of the strategic management team. Key team member driving an innovative .NET project at American Electric and Power, built to transform their $3B coal mining business from an Excel-based manual process to an automated, real-time data-driven system.

NovellPrincipal Solution Manager

Jan. 2001 - Dec. 2004Responsible for managing customer relationships, contracts and all project teams in the Midwest. Wrote statements of work, negotiated with clients, actively managed and staffed teams. Was ultimately responsible for success of project delivery and profitability across a 10 state region.

Cambridge Technology PartnersPrincipal / Architect / Senior Developer

Jun. 1992 - Aug. 2004Started my career with a deep technical background, having held Architect, PM, Technical Team Leader, and DBA positions on 20+ large projects doing custom development, Internet and client-server rapid application development, leading teams of 35 or more to on-time, on-budget delivery. Led each custom software, system integration project through design, development, testing and rollout using a large variety of technologies: VB, ASP, C++, SQL Server, Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, CORBA, and Oracle. Clients included Microsoft, Charles Schwab, Pacific Bell, Union Pacific, Internet start-ups and other industry leaders.

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