Jan Beaver is a Ph.D. educator with 25 years of experience in the software industry. His experience covers the gamut of management, development, testing, and technical writing. His first practical exposure to Scrum was a dramatic eye-opening experience that for the first time demonstrated that there really was a better way not just to develop software, but a better way to work in general.

Jan is an expert agile trainer and coach who has worked with a wide variety of companies in an equally wide variety of industries including telecommunications, medical, insurance, media, and smart-grid energy. He specializes in bringing Scrum and broader agile principles and practices to teams, helping them to become effective, productive, and self-sustaining. He also works at the enterprise level using both training and coaching to help managers, executives, and organizations as a whole become successful in their agile practice.

Jan holds BA and MA degrees in history from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The serious study of history provides an in-depth exercise in systems thinking. Seeing the whole, or at least seeking to do so, has become second nature. Understanding complex interactions within and between systems is the focus of much of his work. His current area of interest is the social interactions that occur within complex adaptive systems -- like Scrum teams -- and how to enable true self-organization to achieve innovative solutions to the problems inherent in new product development.

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