About

Welcome to mansell.nl

I am Dennis Mansell, I help organisations ranging from enterprises to start-ups take 'Agility' from being just a word in their strategy and turn it into their dna. I really love sailing, my career started as a yacht skipper. I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with my wife and son.

I have always been obsessed about getting people to work together. I believe strongly in distributed leadership and commitment to performance as the keys to getting the most out of people. I lead from the back - if everyone in the team knows more about what they do than I do then I am in the right spot.

I know a little bit about a lot of things but those things definitely include what is going on in the digital world. Agile Scrum is something that I strongly believe in with the advantage that I can take the enterprise perspective but also that of start-ups and Open Source communities.

This website is my online CV.



Dennis Mansell
+31 6 28 838 432

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Scrum for Startups - Scaling Scrum? or just a lot of Scrum?

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Yesterday I attended Scrum Day Europe , which had the theme 'Scaling Scrum'.  Perhaps predictably, the only one to consider the case: 'natural growth' was Gunther Verheyen .  Everyone who spoke after him was actually talking about how to impose/implement Scrum when you already have lots of people. Startups have the luxury that they can think about scaling before having to do it and can make/choose a framework that they can settle- as opposed to get-crammed-into.
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Finding your Product Goal

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In November 2020, the new Scrum Guide was released, mentioning for the first time a ‘Product Goal’. This block is designed to help you find your product goal.  Attribution to The Liberators , the Scrum Guide and Harvard Business Review .   Preparation (online): Make a Mural from this template You need a video conferencing meeting with 'rooms' of up to 4 people Preparation (physical):  Super Sticky notes in at least 4 colours Print Elements of Value Pyramid as handout Flip-over sheets Flip-over of empty Elements of Value Flip-over of Wicked Questions Flip-over of Integrated ~ Autonomy Flip-over for Actions/Steps 15% Solutions
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Time isn't Money

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Traditional management wisdom tells us that 'time is money'. However, during the years I have come to find that there is no conflict between learning and productivity, even that productivity increases as learning increases. To me this is such a no-brainer that I have had some difficulty in understanding why some managers might be against learning. In fact, on closer inspection, the managers I came across were not actually against learning, they are just against 'wasting time' and unaware that their push to save on wasteful activities such as study time was in fact destroying productivity.
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