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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Why Scrum? Why Agile? CEO Elevator Pitch

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The second instalment of why Scrum, why Agile? What to say to a CEO... “What do you want?” “I have an idea that could be valuable to the company.” “You have 60 seconds” “We have a lot of people working on the product, but [enter employee survey here] shows that they are unhappy. They are also very clever, yet [some percentage of projects - usually ½ to ⅔] of our projects are failing - costing us a lot of money and frustration. Moreover [some big competitor] are moving faster than we are. Many of our people don't know who they create value for or why. “This is caused by our big plans and need to control the process. “We could take a small, self-organizing team, with all the necessary skills and permissions, and start releasing customer value early and often. It’s called Scrum - I’ve seen it work at a start-up but it also saved [some competitor] from going under.” “What’s in it for us? Sounds like we would lose control” “Scrum would at least show up
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Why Scrum? Why Agile? My Sailing Friends

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