Erik Yek

I started my career in sales and marketing and then moved into project management and ecommerce. Before agile came about, I remember getting frustrated with the plan-driven method of delivering projects. Following a plan to the letter often led to poor quality products and services and overburdened project teams. Agile got rid of all that. 

After leaving a managerial position at Sing-Hui Enterprises, I worked as a college lecturer for a bit and then began offering my services as a freelance agile coach and trainer. The modern agile principle that has always guided me is to "make people awesome". To do this, a coach, trainer, or team leader needs to be empathetic, knowing the context of people in our ecosystem, their pain points, what holds them back, and what they aspire to achieve.  

As an agile coach, it is essential to be comfortable with not having all the answers to everything yet but being able to ask questions and support the project team to find the answers on their own. 

My other passion is Kanban. Visualising workflow, limiting the work in progress, focusing on flow, streamlining processes, implementing feedback loops, and continuously improving are all things I prioritise both at home and at work.  

Having a Kanban board helps me to visualise and prioritise the purchases of my two teenage children. When I'm not juggling the demands of my teenagers, I am drawn to studying philosophy. I find the agile practice can be quite philosophical in nature. 

My certifications:

• ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Project and Delivery Management (ICP-APM)
• ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Product Ownership (ICP-APO)
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)^®, Scrum Alliance^®
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)^®, Scrum Alliance^®
• Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner, IBM
• DASA DevOps Fundamentals™
• Kanban Management Professional (KMP), Kanban University
• Scrum Fundamentals Certified (SFC™), SCRUMstudy

My education:

• Master of Science in Information Technology, Nanyang Technological University
• Graduate Diploma in Business Administration, Singapore Institute of Management'
• Bachelor of Arts, National University of Singapore