Mike Banta has spent nearly forty years in application development, beginning as a COBOL programmer. He quickly moved to development team management. His most recent full time employment experience is as an executive level manager of development teams at a major financial institution. In these leadership roles, Mike has been responsible for many diverse major projects, including large scale system conversions, Y2K remediation, web based UI development and more.
While in his executive role, Mike was involved in the adoption of an Agile Development program at the same financial institution. He trained and worked alongside Agile luminaries such as Michael Spayd and Lyssa Adkins. Mike has performed virtually every key Agile role - scrum master, product owner, technology manager and coach.
Given his experience in working with legacy technologies, Mike took on the development of a local and outsourced support model for an aging COBOL portfolio. This became very effective - overcoming resistance from local application development staff, building team relationships, delivering successful projects, and creating a durable 24 hour support model. Mike is convinced that THE key success factor in creating successful offshore programs is to engage local frontline team members in the process. Let's face it - a visit or two from an executive to the offshore site doesn't do much. Mike would regularly bring both developers and QA specialists to the offshore office (in Chennai, India). Two great results came from this: trusted team relationships were created and nurtured, and truly effective training and coaching of the offshore team partners took place.
If you are looking for someone to guide and direct you and your teams into a successful offshore / outsourcing model, or for other team collaboration and performance maximization, reach out to Mike at:
Mike graduated from Texas Christian University with a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Divinity. He is also a highly regarded guitarist, recording and performing around the world.
Located near the town of Elizabeth, Colorado, Mike can commute to sites from the Denver Technical Center to Colorado Springs. Mike is also fully equipped to telecommute with your organization.