Testimonials
Bob is a strategic yet completely pragmatic thinker who is able to translate complex concepts, methods and approaches into real-world uses. As a voracious learner Bob is among the best teachers as he is enthusiastic about helping others quickly take hold of new ways to accelerate productivity and delivery of high quality work product. As a leader responsible for global product development, I entrusted Bob with the most difficult challenge: help transform a very large organization deeply steeped in waterfall development methods to Agile nearly overnight. Bob organized the approach, adapted wherever needed to fit the culture and led the organization to a new world of speed, productivity and excellence. He helps even the strongest blockers in the organization get excited and find the value in the new approach. In a very special way, Bob is sort of an organizational pied-piper — he has a unique style and is able to harness a group’s energy and mobilize efforts around the Agile method in a way I’ve never seen before.
Senior Vice President, Product Management
From very early on it was clear that a very aggressive deadline was not going to be met using our conventional approaches. Bob successfully championed the adoption of agile methodology and this was a major factor in the project successfully delivering on time, on budget and to specification. He played a key role in turning around a multi-year, multi-million dollar project. In addition to the specifics of “how to” in the area of best practices and methodologies, Bob engendered a highly collaborative and supportive attitude to the team which, above all else, is vital if you are to succeed.
With his forward thinking and his desire to find the path to success, Bob’s guidance and advice was valued and trusted. I have not encountered another person as well read and well versed as Bob is in the fields of “Lean” and “Agile”.
Michael Casey, Director Architecture
I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Bob as part of a transformational effort to build new product in a new way with a large, cross-functional team that had tight deadlines and little experience with the Agile approach. Bob was one of the leaders of this team and had the considerable challenge of championing this totally new approach to a team that initially had a mix of believers and skeptics. Bob played the roles of coach, educator, program manager, and change agent to name a few. There were so many talents that Bob was able to bring to the team but the most important, in my opinion, were his passion and integrity. The fact that Bob was a trusted advisor as well as a tireless champion was critical in building the team and teamwork without which there was definite risk of failure. Bob always gave his all and we were able to succeed, in no small part, due to his strong leadership.
Don Chun, VP of Product Management
In 2007 I was hired by one of the world’s largest providers of financial services with a mandate to build an entirely new global Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO) platform, and the associated services, for multinational clients with 15,000+ employees. As if that was not enough of a challenge, the other mandate that I was given was to simultaneously change the company’s existing bureaucratic Waterfall development process into a streamlined Agile development process. Since this effort would replace the company’s current outdated HRO offering in the marketplace, and would be the company’s single largest investment expenditure over the next two years, it was imperative that both objectives were successfully met. To ensure this success I requested that the CIO appoint Bob as the effort’s “Build Process Leader” with the overall responsibility of transforming the entire development approach from the company’s cumbersome Waterfall approach to an Agile Scrum approach. In this role Bob was responsible for planning and leading the execution of the Agile training for over 200 people spread across the world; setting up 9 team-rooms; implementing the agile tools required to support a global team; defining and rolling out the processes for code development, configuration control; Quality Assurance; environment backup and migration. In addition to these activities, Bob also drove all of the pure Agile transformation efforts to include: leading the effort to establish the Scrum “rules of engagement”; providing daily coaching to people on the Agile process; running the daily scrum-master standup; identifying and implementing process improvements; and protecting the Agile teams from the outside agents that wanted to re-impose the flawed waterfall approach. Due in large part to Bob’s leadership the effort was overwhelmingly successful. The HRO product and services were developed faster, the functionality met more of the market requirements, the development costs were lower, the development teams were more self-actualized, and the company’s ROI was significantly higher than what was achieved with the standard waterfall process. Needless to say, based on my experience with Bob, if an organization needs a knowledgeable, thoughtful, hands-on Agile transformation agent – then Bob is the guy.
Geoffrey Phillips
VP of Product & Program Management
Bob is a change management expert with extraordinary insight on the technical, physical, cultural, and human capital requirements for enabling the full power of the agile methodology. If your firm is interested in pursuing an agile approach to reinventing business processes, I highly recommend that you seek Bob’s guidance. I have personally seen Bob enable organizations to successfully deploy and sustain transformation initiatives.
DJC, Senior Vice President
Bob Fischer is an excellent program manager and his combination of creativity and professionalism was exactly what we needed for a large (over $27 M total spend) program went from failure to success. Our team of professionals had strong opinions on the program. Bob was able to take on board their ideas and steer us towards an outcome that we are proud of. His leadership role for the deployment of Agile to over 100 people, which included both coaching at the team and program level as well as working with business groups was excellent and seamless. He clearly understands the big picture and transforms it to clear strategies and executes them across functional groups in a positive and productive manner. It was a pleasure to work on any program that Bob was leading.
Subbakaran Singh (Karan)
Systems Project Manager
Bob Fischer is a passionate Change Agent, whose enthusiasm in regards to agile methodologies is unrivaled. He is the kind of person who not only lights up a room with creative energy, but also gets the job done. Bob is the kind of guy who has developed an amazing network over his many years of experience and enjoys connects people who have similar professional interests.
Agile Coach