Niels Verdonk

I started as a software engineer and as you can imagine I have worked in many waterfall projects. Around 2001 I first heard about eXtreme Programming (XP) and read the book from Kent Beck, eXtreme Programming explained. I began to promote it inside the consulting organization I worked for and we even used it for an internal project and small client engagements. As a technical consultant and architect, I made sure there was a strong focus on quality of code and that we used automated testing practices, even when the projects were not all using XP.

After working in predominantly project oriented organisations, in 2006 I became the Development Manager of a small startup, eBuddy, to be part of real software product development. I was made aware of the Scrum framework by a colleague and after reading some articles about it, this seemed to fit perfectly.

We quickly realised that scaling teams introduced a lot of dependencies between teams, which slowed down our delivery speed. Based on the concepts I read in the book from Graig Larman and Bas Vodde – Scaling Lean and Agile Development, we started to experiment with Feature teams. Two years later we had 55 developers working in 9 teams, 43 in Amsterdam and 12 in Minsk. Most teams were using Scrum, some were using Kanban.

I realised I wanted to start help other organisations to benefit from Agile practices and I have been working since 2011 as a coach and trainer in many organisations, raging from small startups to large global enterprises. Not only in software development initiatives but also in hardware product development.

In 2022 I joined Better Change, a group of master level coaches and trainers, because we enjoy working with each others, we can learn together and share experiences. I don't use presentation slides, only flip-overs and hands-on activities and assignments. Because I combine training with coaching, I have extensive experience applying the agile practices at my clients. So next to the theory, I can share real life examples of how agile practices can be applied.