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In this episode, Jutta Eckstein, an independent coach, consultant and trainer, based in Germany, shares 

  • Her origin story of starting as a product engineer, with an interest in software development
  • Started as a trained teacher and when the need for teachers dropped, went on to study product engineering and studying Pascal – and completely falling in love with software development
  • Also getting trained as pollution control commissioner, when she could move from street protests to actually working to keep pollution under control
  • Her early experience with Pascal and Assembler, and Smalltalk being her all time favorite
  • Being part of the professional communities such as OOPSLA, and getting an orientation on the techniques and practices that got crystallized as Agile practices
  • Her transition from an engineer to a coach : discovering her strength based on a trigger by her project manager
  • Moving into areas of architecture and design and becoming a team coach
  • The difference between a consultant and coach roles
  • Studying business coaching and change management, to get a formal understanding and foundation
  • How that enabled developing connections with people across various industries
  • My task is not to create the right mindset, my task is coming with the right mindset myself
  • The importance of listening, coming with experience, and working with experts
  • Starting with a retrospective
  • Starting with a few questions: clients having prior experience with change
  • Why do you think it will be successful this time
  • What hinders you from starting now
  • If she discovered anything surprising in these initial explorations… her response of a pattern she sees.. In the next episode

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book entitled Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova). Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.

links: @JuttaEckstein | https://www.linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein/ | https://www.jeckstein.com/| https://www.agilebossanova.org | https://jeckstein.com/sustainability