Hubert Smits is a member of Arthur D. Little's AMP open consulting network. He is an innovative, assertive, and goal-oriented Agile consultant, coach, and trainer with a track record of successfully spearheading enterprise-level Agile and Lean enablement efforts. Mr. Smit's work is based on 15 years' experience in the Agile domain, complemented by 20 years in project management, working with dozens of corporations, training and coaching thousands of people in their steps to move from classic waterfall processing to Agile product delivery.

Because complex delivery is where the Agile principles excel, they can be used in the industrial arena where product delivery takes five years or more. Mr. Smits, along with business partner Peter Borsella, has taken the principles and framework of Agile and applied them to industry, manufacturing, and physical products. Together, they have created the Industrial Agile Framework™: bring all relevant people together in a team, have the team deliver physical product early and often, inspect the product early and often, and steer the team based on these inspections. Simple – not easy. As a veteran in the Agile world, Mr. Smits has observed a world of Agile consultants who do not take responsibility for ensuring their clients’ success and who are not part of their project. His coaching is a hands-on experience where, as part of a team, he works out problems with the client so everyone gets the most worthwhile experience. This is taken as far as building a concept car with client teams. With coaching, teams learn new practices and embrace new thinking, steps in which they unlearn and get rid of muscle memory, and steps in which they learn to distinguish which old practices are good in the new framework.

Mr. Smits has worked with startups, distributed teams, and teams in the US, Europe, Middle East, and the Far East, plus mixes of all those countries, sometimes in a single team. Specific industrial experience includes electronics, banking equipment, and chip design and manufacturing. Mr. Smits organized the first Scrum for Industry gathering and cocreated the Charter for Product Development. He holds a Six Sigma Black Belt and is a Certified Scrum Trainer. He can be reached at experts@cutter.com.