Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners and currently working with HBO and the NYC Department of Homeless Services. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT.  He owns a small consulting business based in New York City and Washington DC.  Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies.  Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies-- such as cloud.  Most recently, Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.

 Mr. Strong is a frequent conference speaker at Agile conferences and Meetups on topics such as Organizational transformation, legacy modernization, DevOps automation, and test automation.  Mr. Strong teaches classes on Cucumber and SpecFlow automation tools for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and systems thinking and agile problem solving using Lean Kanban.   He has assembled and led high-performing hybrid software development teams comprised of staff from multiple vendors while working in politically sensitive environments with disparate stakeholder groups.    Mr. Strong believes that secret to success at leading IT efforts lies in a combination of interpersonal skills and a deep understanding of organizational culture together with the ability to deep-dive into technology and get hands-on when needed.