What's behind Cultivate Agile

Paul's History

Leveraging over 20 years of application development, project and program management experiences he has managed projects in healthcare, insurance, manufacturing and retail environments.  As a consultant, Paul's clients included Farmers Insurance, Accenture, Key Bank, Progressive Insurance, Western Reserve Group Insurance, Westfield Insurance, MedData and Verisk Analytics.

Paul has an undergraduate degree in Industrial Management (MIS) from the University of Akron and an MBA from Walsh University.

Additionally, Paul holds the following certifications: Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and SPC4 (SAFe Program Consultant).  

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Paul lives outside of Cleveland, Ohio with is wife of nearly 20 years and their three boys ages 10, 15 and 17. He enjoys outdoor activities including soccer, hiking, camping, photography, and very poorly played rounds of golf.

Agile History

Starting his career as an application developer, Paul knows the challenges that come along with software development.  Changing or ambiguous requirements, completing code only to have it never see the light of day.  Traditional software development methodologies seemed to have the answer. Ask the end user what they want, document those requests and deliver software according to the documentation. While a step in the right direction, traditional methodologies still saw projects failing at rate over 50%. 

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In 2006, Paul was one of the first to earn the Certified Scrum Master certification, and began to see the benefits of using a lean and agile approach to software delivery.  However, there were still issues.  While Scrum works well on small teams, Paul realized that the benefits of Scrum were being lost on larger implementations. This is when he discovered new frameworks being development to address agile at scale, including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).  In taking the benefits gained from the small team use of scrum and scaling those up to the enterprise it became clear that there is a way to have your cake and eat it too.

Paul started Cultivate Agile to better serve organizations who may have already adopted agile techniques and want to improve their agility or organizations who are still evaluating their agile journey.