Mike
Cottmeyer
Chief Executive Officer
Mike serves as LeadingAgile’s resident champion of core agile values and principles. He is passionate about solving the challenges associated with adopting agile in larger, more complex enterprises and is passionate about leading large-scale agile transformations.
Recent Posts from Mike
Mike has held many certifications, such as: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), and DSDM Certified Agile Project Leader (DSDM APL). Mike co-created the DSDM certification while serving on the board of APLN and was part of the core team that created the PMI-ACP certification.
Mike is thought leader and industry disrupter in the field of enterprise-focused agile transformation.
Mike has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry working for companies like IBM, EDS, John H. Harland, and Fiserv. Mike launched his consulting career working for VersionOne, an Atlanta-based, agile project-management software company. During his tenure at VersionOne, Mike helped companies understand their organizational operating model and how they could best implement the software within their particular context. His perspective was shaped by helping these companies overcome the barriers that were getting in the way of adopting agile methodologies at scale. Mike became extremely active in the Agile community as a blogger, social media personality, and speaker.
Mike speaks around the globe, has done keynote presentations for the Federal Reserve and Agile Indy. He’s also been an invited speaker on Agile Transformation at the Agile Alliance’s annual Agile conference multiple times.
Mike formed LeadingAgile as a reaction to the bottom-up, grass-roots approach to agile transformation that many in the industry are taking. Most of the challenges associated with adopting agile at scale can only be addressed by the C-Suite and require significant changes to business architecture, organizational design, technology deployment patterns, and many aspects of traditional program and portfolio governance. Many of the failure modes companies experience when adopting agile are well known and can be avoided with appropriate planning and attention to managing change across the organization. Mike believes that agile transformation can be intentionally planned, controlled, and measured.
Mike has avoided taking a methodology specific approach to transformation and believes it’s important to meet a company where it is and help create the conditions for agile to thrive. To that end, LeadingAgile has invented language around the Three Things, the Four Quadrants, and the Ten Circles; an organizational metaphor for incremental and iterative change management that brings Expeditions through Basecamps… each with a measureable outcomes, appropriate leading and lagging indicators, as well as software designed specifically to make visible exactly what is happening as a company goes through the significant changes necessary to adopt agile.
As the CEO of LeadingAgile, Mike continues to speak and write, while building and growing his company and leading change in large organizations.
