I’ve spent nearly my entire career focused on how to profit through the application of information technology. I started building BASIC-based models for the US Commerce Department to help enforce fair-trading laws in 1980, and I’ve made it all the way to rolling out a mobile system that does instant mortgage approvals based on data gathered from automatic deposit data in any major bank. In between I’ve been on teams that built customer information systems, early web-based home search, branch banking systems, and a passel of systems that helped Wells Fargo and its struggling home owners get through the financial crisis.

My college education was completed early in the computer age. At Carleton College as a young physics major there was only one half-quarter computer class, while in graduate school at Princeton for international economics our computational life was confined to a statistics program that generated 80-column cards for entry to the computer behind the glass wall. When I joined the Commerce Department in Washington in 1980 I was the first professional in the building with his own Wang terminal, which I adopted early to support my role writing policies, speeches, briefings, analyses, and a treaty with the European Community.

From DC my family and I moved to Minnesota where I have mostly bounced back and forth between the two big banks, after several mergers each now Wells Fargo and US Bank, with an interim as CTO of a real estate software company. I began as a commercial lending trainee and gradually drifted towards my true calling as a business-oriented software engineering leader, progressing from strategic planning to project management, system management to CTO and business line CIO roles.

Ever since my first program on a time-sharing terminal in Washington, I’ve been drawn to operational improvements through computing. Early on everyone did “agile,” so that is native for me. I then lived through the fascination with formal methods, computer-aided software engineering, Capability Maturity, counting lines of code, and more, all of which I learned from but none of which I could completely embrace. When the Agile Manifesto was published I was immediately attracted to it and built upon it since.

I’ve been fortunate to see software development from its early days in business evolve to the pervasive endeavor of today, mostly in two outstanding large financial institutions and in one software company. I’ve worked closely with dozens of software and technology services companies and have seen a lot of success and unfortunately a lot of failure. My most intense period was managing the technology and process engineering for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage through the financial crisis, while my biggest failure was the disaster that sparked me to write Tale of Two Systems. Relevant formative experiences include my stint managing a large mortgage operations group which led me to lean operations, the leadership training from Lucy Buckley at just the time I needed it, and many lessons I’ve learned from the great people with whom I’ve been lucky enough to have as team members.

These experiences and my native curiosity and analytical bent provided me with the foundation to assemble the personal view on lean and agile I’d like to share with you. I hope you find it useful.