Paul Henman, Agile Coach

About Paul

Paul Henman has been an agile coach for over ten years, working with small (single dev team) organisations to multinational corporations. He has coached teams, managers and directors in both engineering and product groups and non-technical stakeholders.

Before coaching, Paul has been a software developer, team lead, project manager, and QA manager. When he joined Systematic Software Engineering he had the opportunity to recruit a team and co-create many practices which were subsequently discovered to be very similar to Scrum. The team naturally coordinated via daily stand-ups and weekly retrospectives; they worked in short iterations, providing frequent deliveries to get end-user feedback.

Expertise & Experience

As an agile coach with engineering departments: aided the technical leadership with the evolution of development processes; facilitated lean coffee sessions, workshops, and team coaching sessions; fostered the use of spikes to reduce risk; introduced a range of retrospective techniques, and tools for more structured approaches to discussing user stories and epics. Supported teams in the evolution of their Scrum/Kanban approaches, expanding their awareness of the wider agile community and a variety of practices.

As an agile coach working with many client-facing groups: observed and advised delivery teams, managers, product owners, and stakeholders; helped them create roadmaps and growth plans; designed and delivered workshops to support that growth; facilitated additional learning opportunities (e.g. lean coffee sessions, book clubs, communities of practice); facilitated Agility Health (maturity) assessment for the program management team.

As a member of internal agile competency centres: facilitated regular community meetups for agile practitioners across the company to share their challenges and discoveries; pair-coached geographically distributed teams; expert on assessment panels for internal coaches and on interview panels; mentor to new scrum masters and coaches.

Recent roles

Senior Agile Coach, Index Exchange (2019-current)
Agile Coach, EventMobi (2017-2019)
Senior Agile Coach, EPAM Systems (2013-2017)
Agile Coach, RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) (2010-2013)

Other interests

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