Recommends
“In my role as Chief ScrumMaster and Co-CEO at my last organization, I hired Simon as an executive and team level coach to help us through our own transformation to agility. I do not exaggerate when I say that we could not have been as successful as we were without his support and guidance. He supported and challenged me in my leadership role, led teams through their formation, and knew exactly when to give space to let people experiment on their own. He was a calm and steady presence through tumult, and yet never ceased pushing us to be the best organization we could be.”
It is my privilege to share with you my experience working with Simon Orrell, a talented and empathetic coach who is grounded in values and value. I would highly recommend him as an enterprise level leadership and organizational coach for any organization who is committed to developing their agility. Here are my observations after knowing him for six years and working directly with him in my organization for two.
Talented Simon has an uncanny ability to see through the noise to the heart of an issue. With a combination of highly developed intuition and years of organizational experience, he is able to identify issues and help his clients find the solutions themselves. His direct but compassionate approach helps leaders and teams to accept where they are in order to pursue where they want to be. He is deeply experienced in applying agile values and principles, having applied them across many industries.
Empathetic Developing agility is not an easy task. It requires more of us, both cognitively and emotionally. Simon is able to help individuals and teams through the “tears and fears” portion of a transformation, validating their feelings while encouraging them to press forward.
Value driven I cannot count how many times Simon would help me out of a stuck place simply by asking, “Where is the value?” So often in business, we become so focused on “executing the plan” that we forget to keep checking that we are delivering value. One of the most difficult tasks in leadership is prioritization, and Simon will help you to understand how to define and prioritize based on value.
Values driven Simon is a deeply values-driven person, and will encourage you too to stand in your values - as an individual and an organization. Another key element of prioritization in an organization is knowing who you are and what you stand for. He will encourage you to become very grounded in your mission, vision, and values in order to make those decisions clearer and easier.
— Melissa Boggs, Senior Director Business Agility - Sauce Labs
“This is a story. A story that develops over about a decade. It starts with Simon's hypothesis as to whether the Agile mindset and the Scrum framework could be adapted and then evolved to address the complexity of major gas midstream construction projects. These projects and the program they belonged to summed over $4 Billion.”
Fast forward that decade, the results that changed the way industry can deliver projects are better than 95% of major projects globally. As a project manager, project director and ultimately senior manager, it changed my life. Simon worked with the owner’s teams and internal coaching resources, EPCM teams, construction and fabrication teams in the application of Agile and Scrum and interface management. This meant that he helped provide engineering and supply chains working remotely around the world along with fabrication and construction sites across western Canada with the unique tools to deal with the emergent items that make complex projects so challenging and often unsuccessful. Importantly, his work provided amazing people across all stakeholders groups with what was necessary to address complexity which must be understood to be different from complicated.
The coaching and guidance he provided over that period and across 5 projects, enabled the execution teams, management and leadership to deliver more than $300 million dollars in saving and cost avoidance compared to sanctioned budgets and to deliver them months ahead of those sanctioned schedules.
With the successes described above, the next challenge was put forward by the owner……is it possible to further adapt what was developed to an operations environment across western Canada? Could it be adapted and improve efficiency in the complex multi-disciplinary work of surface land, lease construction, drilling, completions, production and operations engineering through plant processing and off to sales receipt points? As it turns out over the next couple of years, it is proven possible. With Simon’s work, internal coaching resources, senior and executive leadership, it is indeed possible to transform a company with hundreds of people across many disciplines and geographical separation to a company that works with an Agile mindset within a Scrum framework. This operating team initially set forth and successfully recovered tens of millions of dollars of budget over-runs across a year. Ultimately, the organization was transformed to run the daily business with assurance that they were working at peak velocity and always working on the most important thing within a rapidly changing environment.”
— Randy Barker, Senior Manager-Retired Encana (Ovintiv)
“Simon came to our organization as an Enterprise Agile Coach after our company had embarked on a SalesForce implementation. He took a group of internal and external people on mixed teams--and sometimes dispersed--and introduced us to Scrum. And, he did a tremendous job.”
He asked challenging questions, provided guidance, and worked with us to confront what at the time seemed like insurmountable obstacles. He coached, he trained, he mentored.
While his main focus was improving the Scrum team's agility, he also worked on similar themes with our PMO, offering important guidance and direction.
Simon has the ability to move seamlessly from the team level to management to the executive level, all while keeping the big picture view of what is important. He was a true transformation catalyst and had a lasting effect on how we understand and organize our work.”
— Thor Burnham, Project Manager AFSC