Jay Conne has coached and trained Agile/Scrum teams from first concepts through their first handful of iterations in Agile adoption and habit change.  Client teams have found Jay's approach to be down to earth, supportive and well integrated as he encourages teams to do what makes sense to them without any devotion to dogma. 

The Agile/Scrum framework is taught as a good start-up framework to wrap around one's business and engineering discipline.  See Ken Schwaber's site, www.controlchaos.com for details.  The Extreme Programming (XP) engineering practices are taught as the engineering discipline for creating, testing and reviewing code.  

Jay has just run a Deep Agile 2-day seminar with Jeff Sutherland and Ron Jeffries at MIT under the auspices of the ACM, Boston Chapter (www.gbcacm.org).  This collaborative Scrum-XP event combined some of the best insights from both sides of this community.  We had about 100 people in attendance including some other leaders in Agile conslting.  

You can learn more about Jay's approach and background from his website: www.jconne.com.  There you'll find presentations, first principles and examples of metrics from a real project as the team learned what 'commitment' means through its first five interations. 

In Jay's four decades in the computer industry, he has worked with many hardware, operating system, language and database architectures.  With those technologies, he prorgrammed; developed, delivered & managed training; and did performance characterization and benchmarking.  At Bankers Data Processing, he managed an online banking service-bureau database serving 200 banks in seven states.  the system did, state of the art, full-update transaction processing.  Jay joined Digital Equipement Corp as a Principle Software Engineer driving internal beta-testing of new products.  And three roles later, he was the Systems Integration Manager for DEC's MIA Program Office serving NTT, Japan.  He founded the PO and was responsible for bringing hundreds of components from dozens of hardware and software engineering groups together to meet procurement specs which the MIA program defined.  

Jay has worked at the Bell System on ESS depolyment, and then at GE, Honeywell, GTE, Burroughs Corp., Bankers Data Processing and Digital Equipment Corp.  As a consultant Jay's clients have included firms in stock brokerage, credit card processing, financial services CRM software, web services for e-commerce, medical transportation, and technical, medical & legal training & testing.  

In 1983 Jay was a co-founder of MedRx, a medical computing firm supplying small and medium practices with an early version of electronic medical records and automated billing.  His clients included the head of surgery at Boston Childrens Hospital, the head of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital, the Boston Chinese Community Health Center and many others around the country. 

Research: Jay has worked with emerging programming languages including one prototyped as part of PhD thesis research at MIT.  He was a thesis editor and coach, and then authored the first language primer for the Aeronautics and Astrophysics Dept. of MIT.  More on this can be found on his website under Special Projects.

Jay has been a long term volunteer leader in the Boston Chapter of the ACM.  He orgnized a Deep Agile Seminar at MIT with Jeff Sutherland, Ron Jeffries and Jay speaking on April 28-29, 2007.  See www.gbcacm.org for more information.  Thanks to the ACM, Jay heard Ken Schwaber speak at MIT about Scrum in 2003.  The resonance was so great that he was certified in the next CSM class that Ken taught.  Subsequently Jay studied under Mike Cohn, Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland and many other insightful and committed Agile trainers and coaches.  He has a deep respect and passion for this industry revolution and its great respect for the people it serves.  As a professional trainer and team coach, Jay passionately brings these ideas and practices to organizations wanting to become agile.   

Please contact Jay to see if he can be of service you.  

Recent Comments by Jay

On Certified Scrum Coach Program: Draft Proposal
I like the intention of this CSC proposal. The marketplace values certifications for better or worse. To those thoughtful about the real value of a certification, CSC is a potentially valuable one. The entry criteria appears well scoped and...
On Certified Scrum Coach Program: Draft Proposal
Hi Pete - I'm glad your team is thinking about that. The distinction I'm focusing on may be less than obvious with our cultural assumptions about vlounteerism and altruism which I think is often misplaced. And I appreciate that my view may be to...
On The Blue Peter Problem
Nigel - thank you for this article. I have found little resistance to using unbranded materials in smaller companies. Perhaps it's because I focus the whole discussion in training and start-up around the value. Once people get it in their g...
On Leader of the Band
Mike & Mike, I find it interesting to contrast the humility attribute and the strength attribute. Mike Cohn states well the balance of healthy pride and a team success focus. I would even add the business success focus - and further, the busi...
On Am I, or Am I Not, Using Scrum? That is the Question.
I agree with Melanie's article and Michael James' summary reply. Any like Tobias, the 30 day iteration has never worked for my teams that have typically done 2-week cycles and in one case, 1-week Sprints with two teams that have continued for 9 m...
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time
Hi Mike - This is a nice summary of what I have learned from your great books. Can you add to this discussion the elephant-in-the-room context, 'architecture'? The Agile/XP community is split on how much to specify and when. I'm having this as ...