Agile Thought leader/Strategist

Arie is a pragmatist who accommodates his pragmatism in structure, discipline and common sense. He is not afraid to enter unknown and untrained paths and to take risks. He has done this since his first days in health care, later in the armed forces, and he continues to do so today. This has led to his special position as co-author of the Agile Manifesto. In the course of his Agile years Arie has become an expert in the field of business transformations towards Agile on the basis of strategic objectives and link this to very concrete objectives. He focuses on delivering value, bringing efficiency and creating support among stakeholders, through role and chain clarity based on the business model and the work packages.

The dissemination of this Agile culture and way of working brings Arie in the strategic focus areas. Improving and connecting comes to the fore in every Agile process, as well as creating a performance and development culture. Strategic clarity is expressed in translating the strategy into specific workflows. Investment space is obtained by delivering more effectively, more efficiently and more customer-oriented. Examples of this are business cases of Kasikorn Bank, Home Credit, Delta, Metro Systems, Bosch, etc.

The intellectual property IATM (www.integratedagile.com, www.arievanbennekum.com) is basis for this. Arie strongly believes in leading on the basis of exemplary behaviour and from that perspective is also constantly working on creating / strengthening an Agile (customer-oriented) culture. Moreover, in true Agile there is a strong focus on continuous development of professionals and organisation, optimal performance based on knowledge sharing and feedback and clear task and division of roles, for an optimal value delivery to customers. In addition to the practical guidance of Agile transformations, Arie is a much sought-after speaker at international congresses, gives client awareness sessions and lectures at universities.

During his career Arie has been (in this order) working in the health care, working in the military as a platoons commander, a software developer, a project manager, Agile coach, Agile speaker, co-author of the Agile Manifesto. Next to this career path Arie has been lecturing on multiple universities. 20 years in Rotterdam, 7 years in Amsterdam, 3 years in Utrecht and guest lectures on various universities across the globe.

Wes is a consultant and Agile Specialist at Valiantys. From the moment AgileCraft transformed into Jira Align he has done nothing else than Jira Align implementations and Agile Transformations at enterprises. His mission is to keep as close as possible to the enterprise’s culture while transforming it into to the future of agile. At some point he even tried to explain how agile his football team must be to succeed, but he learned that there are some places that rather have small talk than talk about passion or work. Working together with scrum masters, product owners, agile coaches and executives to get the most out of Jira for Agile organizations for more than a decade now made him understand what Jira can offer them. When he is not working, he is exploring the city he just moved to: Toronto. He can assure you that moving to a city like this from every city from The Netherlands is a change you need to do once in your life. Even when football is called soccer. Something he loves to do and watch in his spare time, but maybe you already noticed that before.