Our mission is to make a world of work that is practical, humane, and rewarding.

If we are going to make work rewarding and improve relationships—that is hard and real work. The classes here at Modus Institute will help you immediately improve, and that will feel good, but then comes the real work…
building that right environment for you and your peers.

We look forward to working with you.

Our Founders

Award winning pioneers in individual, team, and corporate work, Jim and Toni have worked with hundreds of companies world wide, creating collaborative, humane, and highly performing teams that enjoy going to work.

Jim Benson

A pioneer in applying Lean and Kanban to knowledge work, Jim is the creator of Personal Kanban and co-author four books. He co-author of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, winner of the Shingo Research and Publication Award. He is the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, and co-founder of Modus Institute. For the past three decades Jim has worked with teams worldwide, helping them uncover ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments.

Tonianne DeMaria

I want us all to be truly effective - not because I want us to have money or power or get "things" done - but because I want us to get the right things done. I want work and life to matter. When I work with others I want them to feel the passion and excitement of finishing something I do. We get ourselves focused on metrics and numbers and lose sight of professionalism and care. When we do that, we stop communicating. Work becomes about meetings and money and not about success...real success. With Personal Kanban, Toni and I are taking a lifetime of experiences to create a system that helps people achieve - and nothing is better than that.

People should feel their work is valued - that THEY are valued.

There’s a Post-it attached to my monitor reminding me why Jim and I do what we do. It’s from a client who once implored, “Please. Help me justify my existence to my boss.” Not a day goes by that I’m not in equal measure haunted and yet driven by this plea. No one should feel their work is invisible. With Personal Kanban, our once-tacit workload - our backlog, our priorities, our capacity, our effort - is now explicit. It gives us clarity over our options, feedback from our actions, and unassailable recognition when value is created. For us, creating workplaces that are more humanistic than mechanistic, where those creating value ARE valued - is a step towards creating a virtuous cycle. For the employee. The organization. For society as a whole.

The Modus Institute Faculty

PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, CSP, CST

Dave Prior

Dave Prior has been leading technology projects and helping individuals and teams find better ways to manage their work for over 20 years. He has managed projects, programs, PMOs, and portfolios and has focused on Agile since 1999.
Dave has been podcasting about Agile and Project Management since 2008. He currently produces LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes and drunkenPM Radio’s Reluctant Agilist.

The podcasts cover Agile basics, best practices for transitioning from waterfall to Agile, as well as guidance and advice on how to address more advanced Agile topics.

Dave works for LeadingAgile and leads Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes throughout the United States and online. He is also a member of the Scrum Alliance TAC. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Non-Profit Leader

Genevieve
Getman-Sowa

Genevieve is the owner of GGS Consulting where she works closely with nonprofit organizations to provide them with visual management strategies, capacity development, and communications services to support them in achieving their missions.
Genevieve is a founding and current member of N.I.C.E. Consultants (Nonprofit Impact Consulting Ensemble) and continues to serve as Board Secretary for the Community Association for Preschool Education.
Infrastructure & Operations in Higher Ed.

Thushyanthan Amirthalingam

Thushyanthan is a service and operations improvement expert with 15 years of experience in the Higher Education industry. He is focused on transparency and visual communication using agile methodologies (kanban/scrum) for continuous improvement.

He specializes in technical training and coaching; teamwork and cross-functional communication; systems architecture and operations; service improvement; and Lean thinking and Agile processes.

Thushyanthan lives in Vancouver, BC.
“Govie” & GIS Expert

Tim Nolan

Tim has been a local govie most of his adulthood. Public service has been his life-long passion. He has more than 30 years of experience as a leader, speaker, and Lean and Agile practitioner. Texas is home for Tim. He enjoys sharing the success stories of his teams in collaborative and professional management frameworks. GIS was his first love, and Lean Agile Visual Management (#LAVM) is his new love.
Distributed Team Builder

Mark Kilby

With over two decades of experience in agile principles and practices, Mark Kilby has cultivated more distributed and dispersed teams than collocated teams. He has consulted with organizations across many industries and coached teams, leaders, and organizations internally.
Mark shares this experience in his latest book with Johanna Rothman - From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. 

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Don't loose the opportunity to become happier, more effient and more effective in your daily professional life