We are six years into an organization-wide adoption of an Agile-principled Business Operational Framework. The CWI Operational Framework uses Agile principles, such as transparency, visibility, value prioritization, self-directed teams, and adaptation to organizational initiatives based upon the measurable strategic value they deliver. We are building a flexible education institution capable of effectively responding to the inevitable, but unpredictable, changes in higher education. I know many still believe that Agile is solely for software development, but that is simply not the case. We have self-directed teams in Education & Student Services, Instruction, HR, Business Office, Facilities, Operations, Marketing, and of course IT. Each area prioritizes its own initiatives and works with independent backlogs which are reviewed in a regular Scrum of Scrums to discuss collaboration around impediments, dependencies, intersections of workflows, and general sharing of ideas. With all the work visible and ordered by institutional priority CWI has the information regarding the value and effort necessary for the institution to choose, not only what to do, but what not to do the entire organization focuses on the work that is delivering the highest value to CWI students.

Let’s face it, your organization is confronted with a competitive landscape, accelerating at an exponentially increasing rate. Responding effectively to change is essential to your competitive advantage. Agile is primarily associated with software development. But that is shortsighted; it is much broader. Agile is a framework that facilitates the creative development and execution of ideas. Any idea. Sales. Marketing. Human Resources, general organizational efficiency. The core principles of empirical inspection of time-boxed results apply to any complex risk infused problem. Agile’s iterative and systematic approach to solving problems, significantly mitigating risk, and supports the ability to change direction and minimize resource investments in the exploration and expression of new ideas.Adopting Agile/Lean principles in your organization requires a fundamental cultural shift. Cultural change cannot be dictated. Many companies state that they are going to go "agile" without preparing the organization with the tools necessary to succeed. While a lot of people talk about using Agile, there are many misconceptions. Coaching and organization specific training clarifies the underlying Agile concepts and the differences between terminology and practices. If you would like to search out a fresh perspective on a business or technical issue, feel free to contact me at mchacon@itutilitycompany.com and I will be happy to join together with you and discover your value. If it is clear that I can add value to your situation we can put a plan in place and formally engage.You Manage Your Business. We Manage Your Technology ®

College of Business and Economics

My position as an Agile Coach in Micron’s Enterprise Business Solutions has a key role in delivering value through developing, refining, and unifying business processes and systems across the organization. Specifically, in this role I have been coaching the Agile teams in best practices around the development framework fundamentals. This has included coaching the development teams on how to take advantage of Agile, as well as coaching the business in how to work with an Agile team, particularly regarding refinement, iterative delivery of value, breaking down desired functionality into PBIs, and helping the business prioritize what is delivered.To reinforce Agile best practices, I worked with the teams to configure our Backlog tracking tool to capture and transparently communicate the metrics necessary to keep the team on track within their Sprints. I also encouraged and facilitated the team in following the standard Agile events, such as Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. We also reinforced refinement on a regular basis and built the backlog with enough PBIs to fill two Sprints that met a Definition of Ready. I also worked with the Product Owner to reinforce their role in representing the business requirements through continuous collaboration and reflecting business interests through the Product Backlog.Because of these efforts team progress was evident in several areas. PBIs/User Stories were consistently broken down into smaller components, Sprints were consistently completed, testing was incorporated within the Sprints, acceptance criteria were documented in the PBIs, and tasks were updated on a regular basis providing transparency in the Burndown charts.

The foundation of what I accomplished here is based upon "Towards an Enterprise Architecture" in which I describe how the approach and best practices developed in enterprise organizations can be strategically applied to the IT and business operations at IDOC. My document presents a framework to concurrently & independently work within the Organization, Data, Application, and Infrastructure operational domains. Within the Infrastructure domain we began the process of transforming the help desk to a service desk. Moving from incident response to a managed services model, we identified monitoring tools that identified network service degradation and created a ticket in the service desk for proactive attention. Within the Application domain we created a framework to move from a waterfall development process to an Agile Scrum methodology. I developed a strategy to migrate from our existing procedural based Offender Management Systems to an Object Oriented Architecture, working in collaboration with a partner State Department of Correction agency.Within the Data domain I designed the architecture and led the implementation of a Data Warehouse that supports the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) passed by the Legislature, as well as provide time dimensioned reporting for the agency. The architecture is an abstracted model which allows the tools that support discrete ETL processes to be replaced without affecting the other components. The architecture also includes flexible operational domain views defined by Research and Analysis, as well as a Data Mart that provides time dimensioned summary tables for standardized reports.Within the Organization domain I identified and implemented the requirements tracking tools used by the PMO to document elicitation activities. I led the team through creating Business Process Diagrams, Use Cases, Business Rules, and other architectural artifacts to communicate the desired business functionality to the development team.

My first task here was to lead Agile cross-functional teams, following SDLC best practices, to analyze the existing technical services operations. Based upon the results we developed and implemented a plan that reorganized the technical and project management teams into a single business unit. This resulted in lower costs, enhanced clarity of communication with the sales team, and improved customer service. Another significant accomplishment was to bring ITIL best practices to the managed service practice. There were several on-site support desks in place that were not meeting customer expectations. I began an engagement process with the stakeholders clarifying expectations and standardizing metrics to measure response times, ticket resolutions, and documenting the results in regular reports resulting in increased customer satisfaction. These best practices were then extended to the other client engagements. I think my most significant accomplishment was to propose and finally gain acceptance to implement an integrated internal operations management system for the company. When I arrived there were multiple legacy systems that did not inter-operate, requiring multiple duplicate data entry efforts, resulting in the inevitable unreliable information. The various operational units were essentially independent organizations and isolated from each other, resulting in poor internal and external communication, overlapping administration, and unnecessary expense. The new system is already producing more effective operations management, more accurate information for strategic corporate management, and improved customer satisfaction.

I continued my work in the healthcare industry as well as in several groundbreaking Homeland Security areas. The primary area was helping to provide world-class diagnostic capabilities to rural areas. The Agile driven development team at Compressus holds several patents on lossless image compression technology. This capability became the core of a remote radiology diagnostic workstation that could transfer images efficiently over slow communication links. I put together a demonstration system of this technology, which tied rural communities throughout the state of Nevada to major medical centers in Reno and Las Vegas. This resulted in the capability of rural accident victims’ injuries being diagnosed without having to transport the images or the patient hundreds of miles away.Another technology provided the capability of communicating hospital resource availability to response teams in real-time. When a person is injured the closest hospital may not be the most appropriate. Our system would provide the hospital resources available in real-time. This real-time information becomes even more critical during a regional area during mass casualty events, such as terrorist attacks. After a FEMA sponsored TOPOFF exercise using our system in Northern Illinois shortened the timeliness of resource availability from hours to minutes we deployed the system statewide.Compressus is a unique organization that develops and deploys bleeding edge technology through Agile development foundations such as Scrum, and the even tighter feedback loops of Extreme Programming. The technology we created presented a business situation where a market for a useful product is not easily developed and requires a significant education process to create that market. As a result, we spent a great deal of time working with senators, governors, regulatory agencies, healthcare, and federal security authorities to build the consensus and support necessary to deploy demonstrations systems.

I continued my Identity Management focus with the company formally known as Banyan, of Vines fame. With HIPAA and other privacy regulations coming into fruition Identity Management rose to prominence in IT operational frameworks. And with every network system vendor promoting their own directory service the standard IT operation had over 50 authentication and authorization data stores. Addressing these issues required significant channel and partner development. I established business partnerships with several Identity Management companies, each of which provided their own approach to single access and authentication to multi-vendor enterprise IT operations.During this period I was invited to join a Microsoft development team in Redmond to help define and document their Identify Management strategy based upon the Active Directory platform. The result of this extended effort was published in several white papers, including “Planning and Designing an Identity and Access Management Solution” and “Implementing an Identity and Access Management Solution”, which are available through my LinkedIn publication section below. Another significant accomplishment was the development of a single sign-on and authentication architecture for a major health care provider designed to support HIPAA privacy requirements, as well as other organizations such as a number of independent but interwoven secure government facilities.

I was brought in to build the Identity Management consulting practice. I created the marketing, delivery, training and support intellectual property for the practice. This included the foundational contextual, conceptual, logical and physical reference architectures that were developed for each client based upon their unique business goals, objectives and requirements. Following SDLC best practices the resulting information systems were deployed within a validated operational framework that could be measured at all levels of performance and functionality. During our short time my team was able to deliver these services to some very large organizations, such as British Airways, Intelsat, and Dow Chemical.Netigy was great start-up idea that flowered, bloomed, and died all in one season. We were all devastatingly surprised. It had everything going for it; funded by Cisco, staffed by many of the best networking infrastructure people in the world, dedicated to System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) best practices. Unfortunately for the hundreds of people who joined this company of great promise it imploded just as we were gaining momentum. However, I do not regret my Netigy experience as I met and worked with some of the most professional people in my career and our accomplishments were significant.

I met Mitch Aragon while he was the CEO of QuickStart Technologies. He had an idea for a magazine about the Microsoft technical support community that he saw as a focal point of raising the professional level of system engineers. Because of my previous experience of publishing the “LAN Manager Migration and Planning Guide” for 3Com and the “Windows NT Migration and Planning Guide” for Microsoft, he asked me to write a column for the new magazine. I offered the column headline Professionally Speaking and we were off. I wrote that column for 3 years and passed the baton to another so I could write the NT Insider column for another 5 years. Because I worked with such professional editors like Dian Schaffhauder, Linda Briggs, and Michael Domingo who made me look good, I actually learned how to write well. I also published numerous feature articles for MCP and well as for publications such as Network Magazine, SQL Forum Journal, LAN Magazine, and others. During this period I also spoke at professional conferences such as TechEd, Networkers, DEC Symposium, WinConnections and others. My publishing experience also included a book called “Understanding 3Com Networks” as well as several MCSE Study Guides for McGraw Hill and Sybex.

The mission of ITTA was to shape and support Information Technology Education to expand the business opportunities and quality of learning for organizations that create, deliver, and manage information technology and professional development experiences. The ITTA merged with CompTIA in 2000.This organization was comprised of dedicated educators that were determined to standardized the measurement of training effectiveness so the marketplace could be confident that a certified technical or business trainer had the skills and capabilities that a given certification professed. I was strong on the technical aspects of training and certification, but I learned a great deal about psychometric analysis and how to translate the results into the business language. Great people, great experience.

Ascolta was an indirect Inacom partner that initially focused on Banyan networking products and services. They changed their business model to focus on providing high-end technical training primarily on Banyan, Sun, Netscape, and Cisco networking products. Staffed with many of the most experienced system engineers in the industry they became one of Cisco's first worldwide Distinguished Training Partner Award recipients. I was brought over to Ascolta to build out their Microsoft Training business and to manage the technical direction of the company, sitting on the company's Board of Directors. During this period we built upon our Cisco partnership and used our instructors to help Cisco develop practical real-world content for their training materials. During this period I was invited by Cisco to join the Directory Enabled Networking (DEN) standards working group. This was a period when Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, and Novell were warily trying to come up with a common model to manage information systems through directory services. The meetings were dynamic, to say the least, but mutual benefit won out and the efforts were transferred over to the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) where it was integrated into their Common Information Model (CIM).

I joined Inacom as a consultant when it was called Inacomp. Rick Inatome and Bill Fairfield had combined their companies to create what would become a $1 Billion annual revenue organization. I was asked to build up and train the networking engineering team for the West Coast Direct Division. The purpose was to help increase the profit margins by adding more consultative services business to the primary hardware and software sales business that predominated.During this periods we put in some of the first large scale integrated networks for industries such as aerospace, entertainment, banking, auto manufacturing, healthcare, and government agencies. I received my formative management experience here as I was blessed to work with many talented people on executive, sales, and marketing management team, as we met the demands of expanding locations, staff, and overall business.I also had the opportunity to develop and present a national training program, sponsored by Microsoft, where we certified hundreds of Inacom's system engineers to plan, design, implement, and support Windows NT information systems. We received Microsoft's first Back Office award and the program became the foundation for the Boot Camp process of training and certifying support engineers.

This was one of my most important foundational professional experiences. I was the leader of a team of technical consultants, numbering from 6 to 12 over the years, that met every quarter with 3Com's Product Managers and Design Engineers to review and comment on their plans and progress for each of their respective product lines. In those days the product lines were some of the first bridges, routers, twisted-pair Ethernet, and other networking products that entered the marketplace. I remember when the first networking switch to enter the market was presented to us by its patent holder. The conversations covered both the technical and business analysis aspects of bringing a product to market. For example, the co-founder of 3Com and the inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, would explain why twisted-pair Ethernet wasn't really Ethernet because it didn't use coax cable as the "ether", while the marketing driven Product Managers would focus on the branding nuances necessary to drive a new product into the marketplace within an accepted vehicle. Silicon Valley was in full swing and we all had the privilege of working with some of the most creative and brilliant people in the industry. A truly incredible time.