COLABERS
Our team of CoLabers have a mix of skills, experiences and reasons as to why we each love working in an agile way.
We are all professional trainers and practitioners, and couple real-world experience with agile principles and frameworks. We love learning from the people and organisations we train and coach, and feed real-world learning back into our training courses and coaching reflecting up-to-date trends, challenges and technologies.
We empower you to transform yourself, your teams and your wider organisation.
What brings us together as Agile CoLab is a strong collective interest in accelerating our learning through sharing our experiences with each other. As a team, we regularly spend time together to problem-solve, share ideas, create IP, as well as challenge and support each other in our work.
AGILEPETE
AGILE PERFORMANCE COACH & TRAINER
agilePete has worked in the IT industry delivering software projects for over 30 years. For the past 10 years, he’s worked exclusively in coaching and training agile leaders and teams. He is particularly effective at clarifying complex ideas and making agile principles and approaches accessible for everyone. He’s an experienced agile trainer and has developed numerous specialist agile training courses.
In his own time, agilePete loves the freedom of the road. He enjoys exploring our beautiful country in his VW campervan and often sets off with no destination in mind letting the adventure unfold in front of him. He’s a keen golfer and is always open to the offer of a game.
ALFRED ENSLIN
AGILE COACH & TRAINER
Alfred loves building engaging products that solve users' problems. He also enjoys coaching and implementing new ways of working within teams and organisations. He’s particularly skilled in teaching clients Continuous Delivery pipelines and other Lean/Agile/DevOps techniques.
Outside of work, Alfred enjoys gardening, playing golf and co-op video games. He also enjoys TV drama and movies, particularly in the genres of Fantasy, Action, Sci-Fi and Animation.
ALLAN ATKINSON
AGILE COACH
Allan's 35 year career has seen him change incrementally from a Stop/GO sign operator (actually controlling traffic) to becoming an Agile Coach and influencing the way that people work. He likes to understand the way that work flows through a team and uses agile thinking to create simple solutions to work flow.
Allan passionately believes in the power of people and knows that they are always the key to solving any workplace problem. He is constantly learning and looking for improvement in his own performance so he can better support his teams. He enjoys facilitation and brings a bit of comedy to his work. Dad joke anyone?
Outside of work, Allan can be found at the Randwick Archery Club, either coaching, shooting or on the ride-on lawn mower! He's the current New Zealand record holder for the Men's 165m event and has coached a Junior Archer through to a National Indoors title. If he's not at the range then he's probably out walking with his dog, Hoani, around the Petone Beach and Hutt River area.
CEEDEE DOYLE
AGILE COACH & TRAINER
Ceedee is passionate about helping teams and organisations get more out of their work life. She believes that work should be (and can be) fun, productive and satisfying. Ceedee is particularly skilled at thinking laterally and problem solving practical solutions to modern business problems. She is an experienced agile trainer, and helps develop our training courses. She enjoys teaching beginners the agile fundamentals as well as coaching coaches, and loves seeing new and existing teams master the change in thinking required to become agile.
When she’s not working, Ceedee is passionate about board games and organises WellyCon – the biggest board game convention in New Zealand. She’s a keen gardener and likes growing anything edible. In the kitchen she’s partial to cooking extremely fiery dishes so watch out if you get a dinner invitation!
MURF (MARK MURPHY)
ENTERPRISE COACH & TRAINER
Murf is a passionate agile coach and trainer. He is particularly talented at investigating end-to-end systems of work, assisting clients to get work done at scale, aligning technology with business, and optimising the whole operation. Murf always takes a humanistic approach to how he works with clients and finds solutions. He believes everyone should enjoy the work we do and that implementing the agile mindset is a great way to succeed in that.
Outside of work hours, Murf enjoys social time with his family and friends. He’s currently honing his negotiation skills (and patience) with his young daughters as apparently, 4am is the perfect time to play games.
MAHESH KRSHNAN
AGILE COACH
Mahesh started coding in C on Unix platforms in 1990. He has since played many roles in the IT industry and has been a practitioner, mentor, advisor, facilitator, coach, and passionate consumer of knowledge in the agile space since the time he joined ThoughtWorks in 2007. His technical background and working internationally in five countries have helped him lead and coach digital delivery teams effectively. He places specific importance on people interactions, psychological safety, and the shape culture takes that enables and empowers teams to drive performance and experience the joy of effective delivery.
When not obsessed with all things agile and software, Mahesh likes to be in nature, as its magnificence excites him. He is a keen student of spirituality and loves to observe the play of mind and consciousness. He enjoys reading, creating art, listening to music, and also attempting to play musical instruments albeit terribly.
MATT NICHOLS
AGILE COACH
Matt’s agile journey started in 2011 coming from a project management background and has since been involved in many software delivery projects using Scrum and Kanban. Matt enjoys leading, facilitating and coaching people and teams within their contexts to continually improve and become high-performing. He’s passionate about applying agile values, principles and practices combined with human-centered design to deliver value through intuitive user experiences that people love.
Matt takes a pragmatic approach to finding simple solutions to complex problems and making it quick and easy for people to get what they need done. He believes that agility is a journey not a destination and is about building a mindset and practice of continually learning and improving through delivery and feedback.
Matt has a life-long passion for cars and motorsport including some amateur club racing. Matt's other interest is fashion, his wife runs a streetwear store and they source cool clothing from around the world and also have their own design labels.
TONI WILSON
CEO
As CEO of the Agile Colab, Toni is the driving force behind the scenes. She has a background in analysis and as a product owner and is intuitively agile. She’s a firm believer in ‘less is more’, meaning she likes to keep deliverables and processes lean and meaningful to ensure that effort is always directed to where it’s needed most. She is passionate about empowering people to enjoy being at work and seeing the value of what they’re doing.
At home, Toni’s happy place involves singing, dancing, and cooking vegetarian food – often at the same time. She’s currently adapting to life without her twin girls living under the same roof, which has created a combination of deep grief and intense excitement as she realises just how much freedom she now has!
AMANDA MILES
CUSTOMER TRAINING & SUPPORT
Amanda is a motivated and enthusiastic CoLaber. She provides support to both Agile CoLab clients and our own team members, particularly around organising training course. She believes there’s always enough time in the day to achieve what needs to be done and loves finding new ways to work more efficiently. She is a highly organised and task-orientated person, who thrives on working towards valuable outcomes.
When she’s not at work, Amanda loves dance and is a passionate ballet teacher and supporter. She’s a self-confessed ‘crazy dog lady’, a voracious reader and likes putting her feet up with a good Thriller.