THIERRY NIHILL

Introduction - Thierry P. Nihill

I have been an Agile Professional, in all facets from facilitation to delivery and deployment, from authoring to innovating, since 2001. Prior to COVID I was one of the country's most sought after Agile Professionals. I have spent the last 22 years building a very good reputation as an Agile Leader, and as an Agile Professional.

No-one expected the Russian invasion of Ukraine to last this long - Particularly BASF, my last full time employer. On June 30, I willfully resigned from a Full Time Time Agile Transformation Senior Coach with BASF Canada, mainly for a desire to return to the consulting / contracting world but also due to extreme fiduciary concerns world-wide with the organization: In a sentence, I was the only Senior Agile Transformation Specialist and Coach within Canada, the team I was hired to build, the Digital Hub Toronto, deprioritized Agile as a way of work due to these cutbacks (For the first time in it's 160 year history, BASF was financially crippled in Europe due in large part to the war) and my position was not tenable long-term.

It was my decision to free up my seat and my salary in favour of BASF being able to hire another professional who wouldn't just be taking up that seat. Which brings me to today.

Please take the time to read through my qualifications and experience in my C.V. I know you'll find that I am an exceptional candidate for what you're looking for. Not only would you be getting one of the best Agile Leaders in Canada in me, but you'd be getting my Agile Transformation experience as a Coach, Scrum Master, Kanban Facilitator and OKR Facilitator as well as my superior knowledge of Gamification and Story Telling skills. In addition to that background, I have extensive experience assisting in the establishing of an Agile Centre of Excellence with enterprise organizations as well as developing standards and Agile Ways of Work as a process which are in turn governed by the CoE.

Agile has been my love for these past 22 years. I look forward to having an opportunity to interview with you and do into greater depth about these qualifications and skills. Thank you so very much for considering me for any Agile opportunity!

BASF Canada

Agile Coach, Agile Transformation, Global Digital Services – Full Time

• Mentoring, Instruction and Coaching working with Distributed Agile Teams within BASF Corporation (Global) – Mississauga, ON
• Digital Hub Toronto – Agile Coach and Facilitator – Accountable for Region-wide Education Initiatives
• Senior Agile Coach (Canada) working through and based in the Digital Hub Toronto (based in Mississauga)
• Collaboration and Development of Agile Best Practices with Global Digital Hubs (Madrid, Kuala Lumpur)
• Authoring of Agile Training Materials, conducting classroom instruction and mentoring/teaching employees effective and efficient Agile Ways of Work (ex. Gamification; Accountability; Collaboration and Communication Effectiveness)
• Agile Education – Accountable for a variety of BASF Agile Trainings - Facilitation
  • Agile Basics, Agile Frameworks, User Stories, Product Backlog, Kanban Fundamentals, OKRs,
  • Authoring of Certification Examinations for BASF Corporation (Product Owner, Agility Masters)
  • Facilitation of Scaled Agile Education – DevOps Focused - Continuous Development, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Improvement
• Coaching Software Development Teams – Global Digital Initiatives – Mexico, Canada and the United States
  • Introduction of, instruction of, governance of and auditing of the Digital Design Process for BASF:
    • Incorporating the SDLC Lifecycle within Distinct Phases:
    • Requirements – Discovery and Triage of Critical, Necessary and ‘Nice to Have’ Features and Components, Dependency and Successor Identification and Pre-Flight Production strategies.
    • Phase One – ‘Alpha Stage’ – Design and create the concept, discovery of potential errors and omissions through collaboration and time-zone aligned communication efforts shared with all major resources and stakeholders.
    • Phase Two – ‘Beta Stage’ – Identify the priority development components and features and produce a framework to demonstrate a working MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for stakeholder review.
    • Phase Three – ‘Production – Go Live’ – Initial implementation, sandbox environment to production environment. UATs (User Acceptance Testing) are conducted, errors and omissions identified and either corrected (‘Hot-Fix’) or scheduled for future deployments
  • Introducing all relevant Agile Ways of Work to non-Agile aligned teams (Traditional Waterfall).
    • Regardless of project methodology, teaching Agile ways of work in an effort to ensure greater productivity and superior quality of software development and delivery is still critical, relevant and mutually beneficial to development teams – regardless of the methodology employed.

My entire career has been my education. I started in Scrum in the early 2000's - before “Agile” as a methodology existed. I've been an Agile Professional literally since ‘day one’. Due to the very nature of Agile itself, I learn something new, I teach something new, and with a team we figure things out and solve problems together, every single day. There could be no greater education in communication, leadership, team-work, working as a family, adapting to change, solving risks before they become issues, and sharing in the joy of a working, released product that this on-the-job education.