About

Welcome to mansell.nl

I help organisations ranging from institutions to enterprises to start-ups take 'agility' from being just a word in their strategy to sustainably changing their culture. I really love sailing, my career started as a yacht skipper and I have trained and been on some great sailing teams. I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with my wife and two children. 

I have always been deeply intrigued by teams and communities. I believe strongly in emergent leadership and commitment to each other and learning together as the keys to performing. Products and services are tools that should make their users fantastic and will therefore be fun to work on.

Enabling innovation and problem solving with Lean and Agile - where especially Scrum, Human Centric Design and Open Source are my weapons of choice - I have the advantage that I can take the perspective of a manager but also that of a start-up founder and a developer.>


This website is my online CV.



Dennis Mansell
+31 6 28 838 432

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Agile after Corona

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The Company to Consumer model under threat teambrunel.com Originally I became interested in agile software development when I started to discover a pattern between great teamwork in yacht racing and teams that produced software.  Some of the greatest software teams that I worked with were people working together on open source projects. Thousands of people worked together in self-organizing teams throughout their technology stack, much as if they had belonged to a single organization.  Could that model work in more organizations? There was an essential thing missing though - most of these teams were making things that were useful to themselves but not necessarily to a user who would be willing to pay.  Motivation was often very idealistic: working on free (as in liberty) software usually entailed working for free (as in beer).  Some projects became wildly successful, imagine a world without Linux , Wikipedia or Bitcoin .  But do you remember Joomla , Mutuala or Erpal ? It was
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How a yacht race turned me into a Scrum Master

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Continuous Improvement, Autonomy, Validation - these terms are becoming so worn that they feel like business jargon. But if you have experienced the pain that Stagnation, Command & Control and Big Bang Deployment brings, you have ample reason not to look back.  The mild embarrassment that comes with joining the 'Agile cult' is greatly outweighed by the soul-numbing awfulness that is the alternative. Although the above is my experience too, this is not that story.  I have also had experiences with Chaos - the inferno that regularly erupts in Startupland and in many Open Source projects.  It, not Agile, is the real antithesis to the frozen hell that is Waterfall / Taylorism / TheoryX .  This is not that story either.  I actually started appreciating what I now call the Agile mindset, on a sailing boat. 
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