Meet Our Training Experts

Our trainers build fun and engaging classroom experiences that demonstrate frameworks like Scrum and Kanban as fundamentally workable approaches for building and supporting great products, backed up by a wealth of hands-on experience using them in the real world. Even among the small community of Certified Scrum Trainers (a pool of less of 300 people in the world licensed to teach Scrum courses), our CSTs are widely recognized as two of the most effective Agile instructors in the field, as shown by our fiercely loyal customer base that return again and again.

Richard Cheng

Richard Cheng is the Vice President of Training and Chief Product Owner at NextUp Solutions Training. A graduate of Virginia Tech and renowned Agile expert, Richard has presented keynote speeches at conferences and events around the globe, authored publications on Agile and product management, and is a member of Mensa. Richard has extensive experience working with the federal government, large companies, small startups, non-profit organizations, and associations. In addition to being one of the few Certified Scrum Trainers (CST) accredited by the Scrum Alliance, Richard is also a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Certified LeSS Practitioner, Project Management Professional (PMP), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), and SAFe Program Consultant (SPC).

Classes

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO), and Agile and Scrum in a Day

Dr. Patrick McConnell

Dr. Patrick McConnell is the Vice President of Agile Services at NextUp Solutions and a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) specializing in Agile transformation in the public sector and scaling agile frameworks. A criminologist by training, Patrick transitioned from developing geospatial applications in Agile teams to coaching and training Agile methods and frameworks. He has served as an Agile coach and trainer for over 50 U.S. Government organizations, as well as the states of Alabama, Maryland, and New York.

Classes

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO), and Agile and Scrum in a Day

Jill Stott

A Senior Agile Trainer at NextUp, Jill has decades of experience working in different IT roles and has led many organizations through successful Agile transformations. Jill ensures her classes are highly informative, engaging, and fun(!). She has trained thousands of people of diverse roles and organizational levels (virtually and in-person) on a variety of Agile topics and specializes in coaching the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Over 95% of her participants passed the SAFe exam. She has both a detailed knowledge of SAFe and practical experience applying it and has personally led many diverse organizations through the SAFe Implementation Roadmap from start to finish.

Classes

Leading SAFe® – Certified SAFe® 5.1 Agilist (SA), Team Kanban Practitioner, Certified Kanban System Design (KSD), and Certified Kanban Systems Improvement (KSI)