Paul Henman, Agile Coach

I am an experienced Agile Coach & Scrum Master, specializing in creating tailored approaches to promote team empowerment, product quality and customer satisfaction.

What stakeholders say:

  • “If you’re seeking an experienced Agile Coach who can serve as a force multiplier and drive organizational growth, I wholeheartedly recommend reaching out to Paul.”
  • “His approach to agile coaching is holistic, focusing not just on processes and methodologies, but on the core of what makes teams successful”
  • “He leverages his skills and experience to build autonomous teams that deliver quality software in a very predictable manner.”
  • “He is insightful, and often sees patterns in the ways things are done that others do not see. He then shares these observations in such a professional way to help others see truth and willingly commit to appropriate action in order to make lasting improvements.”

Recent Outcomes:

  • Enabled and supported Agile Transformation by coaching co-located and distributed teams, managers, Product Owners and stakeholders.
  • Reduced the distance between developers and customers by 50% through the introduction of structured experiments, shorter timeboxes, and Agile roadmapping.
  • Transitioned multiple organizations from estimation to probabilistic forecasting; this enabled teams to address the causes of unpredictability.

Specialties:

  • Agile Methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean
  • Digital Transformation at Scale by Utilizing Agile and Other Modern Approaches
  • Training, Coaching, and Mentoring
  • Facilitation including Story Mapping, Lift-Off Sessions
  • Probabilistic Forecasting & Predictability Enhancement

As a continuous learner, I seek out interesting developments in Agile and the wider field. Recent topics include AI; scaling agility; digital transformations; value stream mapping; and Kanban systems.

Recent Roles

  • Senior Agile Coach, Index Exchange (4 years)
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    • Improved the clarity, transparency & focus of product discussions by facilitating the consolidation of overlapping backlogs, leading to a single prioritized backlog.
    • Reduced replanning by 50% and increased visibility into product direction by spearheading the use of program-level backlogs & rolling planning.
    • Collaborated with Product Owners to facilitate Story Mapping sessions, resulting in the co-creation of backlog items, highlighting risks, and reducing unknowns & dependencies for more efficient delivery.
    • Promoted the use of structured experiments with short feedback cycles, resulting in increased confidence in product direction accuracy.
    • Increased stakeholders’ confidence in the teams’ ability to deliver on time by introducing data-driven forecasting (cycle time and throughput). This enabled teams to focus on addressing the causes of variance, further improving predictability.
    • Visibly improved team collaboration through customized “Lift Off” sessions for new Product Delivery Units. The outputs from these sessions included the Definition of Done, an initial scrum board and team working agreements.
    • Introduced multiple teams to Kaizen (continuous improvement), thus enabling them to address issues & opportunities sooner and shorten feedback loops.
    • Supported teams’ growth beyond Scrum “by the book” through training and coaching that covered various elements of Kanban, Lean, XP, and other Agile approaches.
    • Introduced and initially held the Service Delivery Manager role, modelling it for other managers who then took on the role.
  • Agile Coach, EventMobi (1½ years)
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    • Improved the effectiveness of teams’ retrospectives by increasing the clarity of discussions, identifying root causes, and using shorter feedback loops when making changes. (This increased velocity by 20% but also ensured the teams were working on the right thing.)
    • Coached the product team and senior stakeholders on product roadmapping techniques and backlog management (prioritization and pruning) resulting in a 20% reduction in the “concept to cash” cycle time.
    • Introduced key performance indicators and visualization techniques (information radiators) to increase the transparency of both progress and challenges.
  • Senior Agile Coach, EPAM Systems (3½ years)
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    • Building EPAM’s internal coaching capacity
      • Built a supportive network of 12 agile coaches within EPAM Canada by facilitating regular Coaches Community meetups, promoting continuous learning and sharing real-world challenges, discoveries and successes.
      • As a member of the global Agile Competency Centre, I developed internal training materials and promoted novel engineering practices.
    • Consultant on multiple projects at one of Canada’s largest retailers
      • Introduced large (170+ people) project group to the fundamentals of Agile by training, coaching and mentoring them on the Agile mindset, Scrum, and aspects of Kanban, Lean, and XP.
      • As a consultant at one of Canada’s largest retailers, I mentored the client’s project managers towards a more agile, servant-leader approach so they could better support the business transformation.
      • Co-developed tools and documentation with a client’s ePMO (Enterprise Project Management Office) to support their organisational change. Initiated feedback processes including interviewing many delivery team members, project managers and senior leaders to seek their input on the challenges they encountered during the transition.
      • Facilitated lean coffee sessions and created an Agile book club to help spread knowledge within the client’s Agile community of practice.
      • Acted as Agile Coach & Project Manager for a client project to automate a largely manual business process.
      • I worked closely with the client’s end-users and EPAM’s offshore (Ukraine) development team ensuring clarity of the Agile approach and facilitating conversations, demos and feedback cycles.
      • Coaching was mainly for the client’s business team, who had not worked with Agile dev teams before. This resulted in the introduction of the Product Owner role to provide clear coordination of requests. I helped the PO work with the stakeholders to create a product backlog and to prioritise backlog items.
    • Consultant with Canada’s largest national telecom company
      • I coached two client teams, their managers and product owners, most new to Agile. Pairing with a novice coach, we introduced them to Scrum and some elements of Kanban & Lean. Working mainly with the Scrum Masters and managers, we helped them identify and reduce/remove impediments.
      • Collaborated with the client’ transformation team and the other (non-EPAM) coaches to introduce and compare various techniques and practices. I also paired with a coach based in Vancouver to help some geographically distributed teams with Agile adoption.
  • Agile Coach, RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) (3 years)
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    • As a member of RBC’s original Agile Centre of Excellence (CoE), I provided on-demand training, coaching and mentoring for managers, dev teams and business partners in small (max six months) timeboxes.
    • Evolved RBC’s Agile Management Framework based on observations and feedback while coaching teams. (AMF described how Agile projects could meet the bank’s reporting, auditing and other governance structures.)
  • Previously
    • in Ontario: Agile Coach; Scrum Master; Project Manager.
    • in England: Scrum Master; Project Manager; QA Manager; Team Leader; Software Engineer.

Education & Professional Membership

Other Interests

  • Photography: founder & organiser of Toronto Photo Walks for amateur & established photographers
  • Badminton: player, executive committee member and webmaster for local badminton club
  • Toronto Agile Community: volunteer, photographer

Contact Paul

emailcontact_paul@TorontoAgileCoach.ca
phone+1 647-388-5356
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulhenman/
linkedin

Downloads

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PDFs available to view/download:

See also my testimonials page