Design thinking applied to Agility and Scaling

Design Thinking (DT) is a collaborative process for identifying and solving problems by addressing the needs of the people who experience them. It offers concrete tools that translate innovation from an abstract art into a replicate process. Its iterative approach ensures that organizations don’t have to take big risks, but instead regularly test their ideas before making commitments so they can be confident when the time comes to formally invest in new systems or products. Key Principles of Design Thinking: • Collaboration: collective insights and creativity are more powerful than lone genius

• Synthesis over analysis: complex (wicked) problems are puzzles, not mysteries

• Ambiguity is welcomed: uncertainty is necessary in order to maintain an open mind that allows or new possibilities (‘a-ha' moments)

• Make things tangible: communicate problems,solutions using visual or physical representations

• Human centered: solve problems for people by empathizing with them

Our speaker Doug Carter is an adept technology strategist and executive accustomed to heading Scaled Agile transformation in Fortune 50-500 settings, creating ROI through Agile roll outs, new PMOs, staff coaching, and cross-functional business collaboration. His wide influence among systems, DevOps, product, infrastructure, and executive players ensures business benefits including expedited time to market, better collaboration with stakeholders, new products generating millions, and significant cost savings.

Doug currently is a Principal for Agile/SAFe in the Digital Transformation Consulting Practice for an international consulting firm. He leads and supports two types of needs: first, supports clients through assessment, strategy and roadmap definition services and secondly, planning and execution services.

All of this is supported by a strong foundation including an MBA in Finance and Operations Research as well as SAFe SPC4/ SA / SASM / SSM, PMI-ACP, CSM, and PMP credentials.

Selected Accomplishments:

Development of a flagship Data Infrastructure Management product influencing new partnerships with IBM, Dell, Cisco and Oracle as well as expected $1B revenue in 3 years.

Led $30M transformation program for a large financial corporation delivering strong $1B annual savings via cloud features of Salesforce.com, an effort affecting 4300 users worldwide

Near-immediate benefits from Agile transformation initiatives, including 100% better collaboration among product managers and owners, 55% faster time to market, and 50% rise in team productivity (with improved motivation) in financial services, utility, retail government, and hospitality industries. Typical ROI of $100M per year.

Leadership training for teams, business stakeholders, IT staff, Agile change agents and engineers, leveraging reputation as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) expert. Certified over 300 resources in SAFe.