• Agile Coach

Martijn van Asseldonk on his training style, love for Agile and unforgettable trajectories

Martijn van Asseldonk starts his career as a software developer and in 2008 he gets to experiment with Scrum for the first time, where he previously worked with traditional project management. A revelation. An eye-opener. He is immediately hooked on working Agile. He develops into a Scrum Master and plunges fully into the wonderful world of Agile. “I quickly noticed that working Agile allowed us to deliver faster and also the involvement of the team members became very high,” Martijn looks back. So he wants even more: within five years he will certify as a Scrum.org trainer and become a full-time Agile Coach.

‘My training style: training from the back of the room, where participants practice, discuss and discover a lot themselves‘

Martijn himself estimates that he has given about 200 trainings in recent years. And to this day, it remains his personal goal to convey during training sessions that challenges are often complex and do not always have ready-made solutions. Martijn adds: “And of course that experimenting and learning is more important than thinking everything out in advance.”

Unforgettable Agile trajectories

So Martijn has been active as an Agile Coach for years and in that capacity he has also been on the floor of hundreds of companies. To guide coaches. To assist transformations. To guide startups. Time for, as the English so beautifully put it: a trip down memory lane. “The first major transformation in which I was allowed to participate was at ING. With a team of about 15 coaches I guided a business unit to a higher level Agile plan. Among other things, we introduced DevOps teams and coached management in the application of Agile,” says van Asseldonk with appropriate pride.

The second trajectory that has stayed with him is at one of the big supermarket chains in the Netherlands country. And here he gets an online challenge: coaching ah.nl and the ah app. “I developed with a small club of coaches an improvement on the Scaling approach, based on LeSS. And the great thing was: multidisciplinary development teams each had their own purpose, were autonomous and simultaneously coordinated the development of the overarching product.”

A third project that has stayed with the active Martijn is RocSys: a start-up that makes innovative charging solutions for electric vehicles. “Here I was allowed to provide an Agile kickstart, where the team put together its vision and embraced Agile working. Their challenge is to tackle the different characteristics that hardware and software development have in an Agile way. By bringing all the competencies together, RocSys was able to put together a supported vision and a plan of attack to achieve it in an Agile way.”

‘I thrive best in an informal yet ambitious club’

And by … with Agile

Because you don’t sit still when you’re in the prime of your life. No, Martijn switches gears and likes to keep developing. The online training sessions during the corona pandemic are a great example of this: “I hadn’t done this before, and although nothing beats physical on-site training, the experience is a lot closer than I thought.” He takes this hurdle, too, and goes on to deliver one online training session after another. So despite being completely new, and born out of necessity, Martijn takes up this challenge with both hands. Makes sense, too, of course, for a trainer whose personal adage is “Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.”