I have been married to my high school sweetheart for over 46 years.  My wife and I have 2 lovely children and 4 incredible grandsons.  When I’m not traveling all over the world for business, I enjoy reading anything leadership or agile related.

The first part of my adult life was spent in the military.  I was in the United States Marine Corps from 1971 – 1976 and was honorably discharged as a Sergeant/E-5.  After spending a couple months as a civilian, I made the decision to go back into the military and ended up joining the Army in July 1976.  I retired from the Army in 1992 as a First Sergeant/E-8.

I worked as a developer and solution architect over 25 years.  I have had the joys and pains of many types of software development methodologies and frameworks over the years.  I was introduced to XP (Extreme Programming) in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, then reinforced my understanding of it when I read Kent Beck’s book  “Extreme Programming Explained” around 2003 or so;  then around 2005 a colleague gave me a copy of “Agile Software Development With Scrum”, by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle (RIP), and said we needed to use it on our mobile solution project that we were about to kick-off.

I readily admit that when I first learned XP, especially Paired Programming, I was not all that enthusiastic; I was not thrilled about the thought of having someone look over my shoulder while I was coding. Once I was introduced to Scrum and began to really grasp the concepts of working in an agile way, things began to change for me; from that time forward I have been immersed in all things agile related.  I have learned, used, and taught classes to clients on XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, IBM’s Agile With Discipline (AWD), Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and various other “hybrid” client renditions of these processes.

Since my time in the military as a young Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO), I have had the ability and desire to train and coach people on the areas that I was experienced and good at doing.  Being able to coach individuals, teams, and organizations on becoming agile is more than a job; for me, personally, it is what I want to do the rest of my life.

Finally, at the ripe old age of 63, I decided it was time to start working for myself, so in January 2019 I started @Phoenix Rising Trans4mation, LLC; our mission is to motivate, inspire, and empower individuals and organizations to grow and evolve into their best possible selves.