Mark Kilby is an Agile Coach with Rally Software in Orlando, Florida. Since 1990, Mark has helped teams develop unique software and system solutions for government, industry, and academia as a developer, architect, project manager, instructor, methodologist and scrummaster. His experience spans full life cycle development of new and legacy applications for the military, NASA, publishing, telecommunications, and other industries. His passion is working with distributed teams to become great teams through collaboration, automation, and other agile best practices. Mark is a Certified Scrummaster and received a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Masters in Computer Science from University of Central Florida.

• Husband for 15 years
• Father of a 4, 8, & 10-year-old (other training for my facilitation skills)
• Martial arts practitioner (after 14 year break)
• Coach/facilitator for various non-profit groups in the Central Florida area
• Enjoy meeting new people in new places and helping them with challenging conversations
• I hike and cycle when I can (bringing my hiking boots for this trip!)

• These days I work with many new facilitators and “agile coaches” who need ways to quickly understand the principles and patterns of facilitation and need a path for life-long study should they desire it. Some of these folks are in professional positions, but I find many more in volunteer positions. I’m interested in new ways to show them all how they can use facilitation and retrospectives in many aspects of their life.

• I met Diana Larsen at the 2002 XP Universe conference in Chicago where she co-taught a Change Management workshop with Josh Kerievsky. I was completely “hooked” on facilitation by watching them work together! I then had the privilege to take Diana and Esther’s Retrospective Workshops at Agile 2005 in Denver and then had the honor of speaking with Diana and Norm Kerth afterwards. There was no turning back and I’ve wanted to continually hone my facilitation skills from that point on.

• Diana: I’m still working on the challenge of distributed retrospectives.