Agility Coach at Runtastic (adidas) - Kanban Coaching Professional
Linz, Austria
Alper Tonga is an Agility Coach at adidas Runtastic. He is a Kanban University certified Kanban Coaching Professional and Accredited Kanban Trainer. He is one of the partners in Agendashift community, and a public speaker from Turkey.
Between 2012 and 2020, he's led more than 10 organizational transformation journeys worldwide in different companies which do business in banking, telecom, retail, and e-commerce sectors. Within these organizations, he's helped engineering and non-engineering departments/teams, such as; product development, business strategy, infrastructure, operations, purchasing, marketing, and human resources.
Upholds the way of Kanban coaching (being respectful, observing first and offering an alternative later, being an opposition instead of a resistance, preferring evolution over revolution) above all else. Loves using Clean Language (systemic and symbolic modeling) techniques for discovering, exploring and working with people. Liberating Structures are one of the powerful tools he has in his arsenal.
He is a strong follower of probabilistic planning (Lean metrics, random branch sampling, Monte-Carlo simulations) and visual documentation (Wardley maps, mind maps, user story mapping) methods. He believes forming self-improving organizations and aiding their decision-making process with objective evidence (scientific methods) is much better than just following instincts.
Alper Tonga has a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering received from Missouri University of Science & Technology. He has been professionally involved in multinational defense and IT projects more than 15 years as a developer, systems engineer (INCOSE), and program manager. Although he has been applying/using Lean and Agile principles in his work and personal life, his professional coaching and organizational transformation career started in 2012.
In 2016, his experiments on Lean transformation which presented improvements seen on team level (proto-kanban, KMM Lvl 0-1) was awarded 2nd place in the medium sized enterprise category by Turkish Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology Directorate General for Productivity.
When he is not busy with helping organizations managing their flow and risk, he likes to spend quality time with his family. He likes to take pictures with his Nikon D850 (R.I.P. D90), meditates with yoga, and likes to throw people off balance in Aikido Dojo. Nothing to be alarmed, his is just a 2nd Dan black belt.
He has a lot to experience and learn in both areas; work and personal life.