Cliff is
Managing Partner of Agile 2 Academy. He co-founded the Agile 2 movement (agile2.net). He is a consultant who has long
focused on combining Agile, organizational culture, and DevOps. He has been a
DevOps trainer for O'Reilly Online and is a DevOps and Agile subject matter
expert. Previously Cliff was CTO and co-founder of Digital Focus (purchased by
Command Information in 2006), a 1995 startup that grew to 200 people in five
years and adopted Agile (eXtreme Programming) in 2000. Digital Focus built
difficult B2B systems for McKesson Pharma, FedEx, CapitalOne Bank, and many
others, always fixed price.
Since Digital Focus, Cliff has helped more than ten
organizations adopt Agile and DevOps methods, working with leadership and teams
to move the needle. In one case, a McKinsey audit of the client revealed that
Cliff's team was the only team "doing real DevOps" - two years after
Cliff had finished working with the team.
Cliff is the author of six books, including the ebook Agile
Work, published by Bookboone; Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile;
Sun Microsystems’ first book about “enterprise” Java; and the 2005 textbook High-Assurance
Design, which described ways for Agile teams to build high assurance
business systems for banking and healthcare.
Cliff has always been a change agent. In 2014, not
content with the Agile community’s failure to grasp what it takes to change an
organization, Cliff assembled a team of org change and Agile experts and
launched Transition2Agile.com. In
founding the Agile 2 movement by assembling a team of 15, he is trying to change
the industry for the better.
Cliff has experience with
Agile and DevOps in a wide range of contexts, from large multi-product digital
platforms to embedded systems. He has been a nuclear engineer, an electrical
engineer, a programmer, and architect, an entrepreneur, and an executive. He
has masters degrees in Operations Research and Nuclear Engineering, and is an
avid reader of books of all kinds, including mathematics, biochemistry, and
psychology. Cliff's current focus is spearheading the application of
appreciative inquiry-oriented techniques to help organizations to better align
their culture to support true agility.
