Burke Willis

Background

About Burke Willis

In March 2018, I got a surprise phone call. My client, the program manager on a big IT project, told me that her company's Internal Audit (IA) function wanted someone to coach them in Agile. She said,"you would be perfect for it because you're an excellent Agile practitioner and you understand IA.""That's weird", I thought."Agile for IA? No. wait.that's a fantastic idea!" I readily accepted and discovered a deep passion for coaching Agile. Here's why that was a fantastic idea: in both software development and Internal Audit, the end isn't always clear from the beginning. You learn things along the way that make you need to pivot focus. Delivering value in small chunks along the way vs. one big chunk at the end gets you to value faster and to higher value overall. Fast feedback loops with stakeholders improve results. There's always more work you could do than you have time for, so you have to ruthlessly prioritize based on business value. And it's easy for the people doing the work to get disconnected from value, especially if they're asked to complete tasks rather than empowered to deliver value. The Agile mindset addresses all of these things. This is what I've dedicated every working moment to since then: coaching Agile to Internal Audit functions. I've coached individuals and teams in how to adopt Agile principles to deliver greater business value, and I've worked with IA executives and their leadership teams to transform the function to become Agile. Seeing the benefits of Agile take hold at some of the world's preeminent companies has given me great satisfaction. ExxonMobil, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs are a few examples. Perhaps most importantly, I know that what I do is likely to make someone's life better because it makes their job better. That's what motivates me every day. Everything that I've done along the way in my career has prepared me for this: improving finance and accounting business processes, working as a director of strategic initiatives, and working as a corporate IT manager all taught me about improving systems and changing behavior. Serving as a Director of Investor Relations taught me about articulating value. Or in some cases the lack thereof-ask me about my time at Enron!