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

Popular posts from this blog

The Scrum Guide for Dyslexics

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I have made a mind map that makes the Scrum Guide a little more visual for those of us who's brains navigate space better than letters:

Click here for a full screen version






This is a derivative work by Dennis Mansell based on The Scrum Guide. No endorsement is made by either Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, or any of their related commercial entities. The original Scrum Guide is offered for license under the Attribution Share-Alike license of Creative Commons, accessible at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode and also described in summary form at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. By utilizing this you acknowledge and agree that you have read and agree to be bound by the terms of the Attribution ShareAlike license of Creative Commons.
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Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite

Roughly translated as ‘every country has the government it deserves’ - I am getting used to the idea that this may be truer than even Joseph de Maistre may have meant.
I don’t just mean that all our politicians are power-hungry narcissists (something I might not deny), but I mean that humans have, throughout the ages, had leaders that have been created by their followers.  The leaders that floated up, simply had properties that made them buoyant in the social climate that they were in.
Usually this quote is used to complain about the corrupt nature of democracy, but that is actually not what I mean.  I mean it more as an emergent property of the masses, that leaders emerge simply because of certain properties (or perhaps lack thereof like ‘Captain Me’).
Perhaps this clip by ‘CrazyRussianHacker’ can explain what I mean.
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Yet Another Guest Post - Obeya, the Big Room Practice - an Example for Scrum

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I seem to be posting on other people's blogs more than my own these days.  This time I have prepared a piece for Luis Goncalves' blog about using the Lean Manufacturing practice of a 'big room' or 'war room'.  This tool can be used to house a number of other visual and thinking aids like metaphorical maps, value stream maps and A3s to help stakeholders, Product Owner(s) and Developers to work together to synchronize their efforts.

Click here to find out more...
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