Experience
With his deep, in the trenches, agile experience, Bob Galen is widely considered as a "Coach of Coaches" in the agile community.
He's been using Extreme Programming since 2001, Scrum practices since the late 1990s, and Kanban since 2009. He's been actively coaching agile teams, both as an external consultant and internal change agent, for the past 20 years.
Point is: he’s not a recent convert to agile, but instead has been using the methods since the inception of the ideas and approaches. And he hasn’t been simply "consulting". Bob has often held Senior Leadership roles, serving as an internal agile change agent, and has demonstrated a proven ability to create high-performance agile organizations from the inside-out. And he brings that wealth of experience to every client engagement and delivered class.
We work with each client to fully assess and understand their needs. Then propose a solution that will help supplement your experience and achieve your goals. That solution can take the form of customized assessments, coaching, consulting and training.
Company Profile
RGCG was formed in the Fall of 2001 to provide consulting and training services to aid your software teams in outstanding project execution. Early on, we largely focused on traditional software development approaches. But we were an early adopter of the agile methods and quickly made that the centerpiece of our practice.
Robert (Bob) Galen is President and Principal Consultant of RGCG. Bob, in conjunction with our other consulting associates and partners, has deep experience across a spectrum of business contexts and methodologies that you can leverage in a variety of ways.
We also have breadth of experience introducing agility from small start-up and entrepreneurial environments to large-scale, enterprise-level organizations. While this spectrum of cultures requires nimbleness and subtlety to effectively navigate, our experience is that agility works nicely across this spectrum.
Coaching Philosophy
Bob has been a Scrum Alliance - Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) since 2012. He is one of the few coaches who can (and does) operate at the team, group, organization, and enterprise level in his coaching. Most coaches only coach downward to the team and lack the skill, real-world experience, and quite frankly the courage, to coach upward.
Coach of Coaches
Additionally, Bob is one of those coaches that other agile coaches approach and trust to coach themselves. In other words, he often - coaches the coaches, mentoring both client coaches and coaches within the agile community. This is not driven by his certifications, but by his deep real world experience and willingness to share it.
He also mentors individual coaches who are looking to become certified with the Scrum Alliance CTC and CEC level certifications.
Scrum Alliance
Bob is a Certified Scrum Master Practicing (CSP), a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC). He's held these certifications since 2004, 2007, and 2012 respectively.
Of particular note is the CEC. As of 2023, there were ~140 CEC's in the world. Bob became #47. The certification process was arduous, consisting of detailed experience reports, recommendations, and an in-person interview. Material preparation took three months, and the process took roughly six months. It was nearly a year-long process.
Beyond that, the rejection rate for CEC applications is incredibly high--as the bar for entry is high. The Scrum Alliance seeks wide-ranging and deep coaching experience at an enterprise and organizational level. We're quite proud that Bob is now a member of this elite group of Agile/Scrum coaches.
As of December 2023, Bob will become a Certified Enterprise Coach - Emeritus (CEC-Em), one of only four in the Scrum Alliance.
Additional Competency/Skill Areas
Bob walks his talk by continuously learning and improving his agile capabilities. It's something he feels very strongly about and that every RGCG coach supports.
In 2011, Bob attended David Anderson's Kanban Coaching Masterclass. This class served as a "springboard" for our Kanban coaching capabilities.
In 2014, Bob attended Dan Mezick's Open Space Agility workshop.
In 2016, Bob attended TFTBOTR - training class with Tricia Broderick
In 2016, Bob attended Scrum.org - Nexus class for a different view to scaling Scrum
In 2017, Bob re-attended David Anderson's Kanban Coaching Masterclass to sharpen his saw.
In 2017, Bob attended the Trans4Mation Agile Leadership class, which covered the Integral Agile Framework.
In 2018, Bob attended and co-taught a Scrum@Scale Practitioner class with Don MacIntyre.
In 2018, Bob attended The Leadership Circle Profile & Leadership Survey training and is qualified to deliver and coach using the tool.
In 2020, Bob completed the 5-class series to become ORSC (Organization Relationship Systems Coach) formally trained. He will be joining the Willow cohort in 2020 to achieve ORSC certification by the end of the year.
The Leadership Circle
Bob searched for a leadership assessment instrument to help him in my agile coaching and training. You see, we do quite a lot of:
Leadership individual coaching
Agile Leadership training via the iCAgile ICP-LEA Agile Leadership class (in both public & private formats)
Leadership group coaching
In 2018, Bob was certified to use and coach three instruments from The Leadership Circle.
Leadership Circle Profile (leadership or manager versions)
Collective Leadership Assessment
As of our 2023 Private iCAgile ICP-LEA class deliveries, we leverage the Collective Leadership Assessment as the centerpiece instrument for leadership team/group cultural assessment as it relates to agile leadership.