About
Experienced Leadership
Dennis Stevens and Associates is a small consultancy of proven professionals supported by a confederation of experienced independent consultants and business partners. Over the course of dozens of engagements and through years of practical experience Dennis has developed approaches to enable software development organizations to rapidly improve the value they deliver while simultaneously optimizing costs. Dennis Stevens and Associates draws upon these experiences to provide workshops, training, coaching, and delivery support to help companies achieve the benefits of Enterprise Agile.
The How Trap
Many Agile scaling efforts tend to fall into the “How Trap”. The How Trap arises when we focus on how to do something before we focus on the purpose and outcomes required to achieve a goal. Every organization is different in their needs and obstacles. We use a capability view to identify the current constraint and develop situationally specific strategies for incrementally adopting Agile to ensure the on-going release of business value.
Our incremental approach to Agile Adoption starts with small team agile. Then we help the organization learn how to replicate the benefits of small team agile horizontally. Next, we help the organization to coordinate multiple teams across complex products and incorporate all aspects of Product Development. Then, we we help the organization coordinate multiple teams across multiple complex products. Finally, we bring the concepts of Agility beyond development across the Enterprise. In practice, the improvement efforts are not completely linear – with many companies gaining benefit at the portfolio level or down-stream from development while they are still adopting at the small team level.
Dennis Stevens
Dennis Stevens has been helping organizations deliver value through software development and project management throughout his career. For over 25 years he has helped companies leverage technology to improve their business performance through improving technology development, effective project management, and applying Lean and Agile concepts.
After over a decade of writing code, Dennis has been consulting in software development leadership, technology transformations and enterprise project management. He has been leveraging Lean and Agile in software development teams for the last 10 years.
He became a Project Management Professional in 1998, began Lean Value Stream mapping in 1994, an OPM3 Certified Consultant in 2009, and recently completed the Certified Scrum Master course. Dennis is also an Associate in David J. Anderson and Associates.
Dennis was awarded the Naval Commendation Medal during Desert Storm for his service as a Marine Reservist and he played a key role in Operation Fiery Vigil which involved rescue and recovery operations following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Organizational Development and Psychology.
Dean Stevens
Dean is an process improvement and supply chain expert and experienced project manager. He performed the supply chain case study outlined in the HBR article, “The Next Revolution in Productivity”. After a career as a Chemical Engineer, where he was a Plant Manager, Supply Chain guru, Six Sigma black-belt, ISO auditor, and recognized as an expert by APICS in manufacturing flow and supply chain optimization, he has been working closely with Dennis for the past five years. Dean’s practical experience helping organization’s adopt lean and agile concepts combines with his technology project management experience make him a power leader as an Agile Project Manager.
Dean holds a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and earned his MBA from Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business.
Affiliates
Dennis Stevens has long standing-trusting relationships with experienced independent project managers, quality assurance managers, architects, developers, XP coaches, and continuous integration experts. These affiliates have served with Dennis on various projects and have proven an ability to adapt to the environment and deliver whatever is most important to meeting the needs of the customers.
