Mike Decleene

Background

About Mike Decleene

What gets me out of bed in the morning is the promise of solving interesting and important business problems with technology. This can mean helping people with problems understand what their pain is and the options for removing it, brainstorming creative design options for solving problems, coming up with ways to address a team's process issues, or helping a team adapt to changing environments. I'm a Agile pragmatist - I don't use (and teach) Agile methodologies because they're what I know. I use them because they work better than most other ideas we've discovered so far about how to build relevant and high-quality software quickly and well. When we find something that works better, I'll do that instead. I'm a non-believer in a single one-size-fits-all best way to do things, or in a static optimum. Retrospection and discovery is an ongoing quest. Given my problem-centered interests, one of my core interests is Business Analysis, which I consider to be the process of turning problems into goals into actions a team can take. How do we know there's a problem? How do we figure out how we want to solve it? How do we make that happen? I love being a consultant because I have a bit of a short attention span. I love finding and solving new problems, so having a new job (possibly in a new industry) every 6-12 months is appealing to me. I think of myself as a generalist rather than an industry specialist. That said, I have disproportionate experience and interest in the Travel and Finance domains.