Agile Tour Bucharest 2012

Location: Bucharest, Romania

Date: October 26th, 2012

Fee: 75 Euro

Venue: Intercontinental Hotel

Main contacts: Romulus Maier: romulus.maier@agora.ro
Nicolae Giurescu: nicolae.giurescu@3pro-lab.ro

Local website: www.agora.ro

Conference languages: Romanian, English

Call for sponsors: if you want to be sponsor us please contact Romulus Maier at romulus.maier@agora.ro

Program:

8:30 – 9:00 Registration and Coffee
9:00 – 9:10 Welcome Address
9:10 – 9:30 Partner’s Speech
9:30 – 10:45 “Darwin, Agile And The Dinosaurs – Considerations When Evolving Agile To Enterprise Level”, George Anghelache and Cristian Cazan (Romania)
10:45 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:15 “Agile Portfolio Based Release Trains”, Ralph Jocham (Switzerland)
12:15 – 13:45 Lunch
13:45 – 14:00 Partner’s Speech
14:00 – 15:15 “The Product Owner - The Catalyst Of A Reliable Agile Transformation”, Oana Juncu (France)
15:15 – 15:30 Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:45 “We're Agile - And Now What?”, Ştefan Bârgăoanu (Romania)
16:45 – 17:15 “A Scrum Primer”, Ralph Jocham (Switzerland)
17:15 – 17:25 Close & Thanks
17:25 – 18:00 Open Chat

Presentations & Speakers

AGILE PORTFOLIO BASED RELEASE TRAINS

We all know that Agile works great for small dedicated projects. However, only a small part of projects do fit that profile, especially in larger corporate environments. In those environments, you typically will need to add features and fixes to recently launched products, provide maintenance and support for older products until they reach their end of life and last, initiate and release new projects. This challenge has to be solved by any successful enterprise. The ‘Responding to Change over following a Plan’ thinking of the Agile Manifesto seems to contradict such an environment where big planning upfront seems to be mandatory. What a false truism! Agile is the perfect tool to combine those different types of work into regular cohesive but flexible releases.
This talk will show how a Scrum implementation based on release trains and agile portfolio management is an effective solution to a very common large enterprise problem.

Ralp Jocham

Ralph started his career 1997 in Germany working as a programmer. In ‘98 he joined Oracle, UK, working on JDeveloper. Two years later he moved to the USA and consulted in NYC for Spherion. Later he relocated to San Jose to help Applied Biosystems, a leading biotech life science company, to transition to Agile. Early in 2007 he joined ThoughtWorks, as an agile coach. During that time his clients included, The Gap, LinkedIn, Google, and Roche. In late 2009 he moved to Bern and joined Zühlke to help kick-start their agile offerings.
In 2011 he founded www.effectiveagile.com and helps large Swiss enterprises with Agile.
Ralph is Europe’s first Scrum trainer with Scrum.org working closely with Ken Schwaber.

DARWIN, AGILE AND THE DINOSAURS – CONSIDERATIONS WHEN EVOLVING AGILE TO ENTERPRISE LEVEL

Agile Purists and Enterprise Agile practitioners are always debating on how the SCRUM roles, ceremonies and practices should be implemented when dealing with really complex Enterprise environments and solutions. Can a single Product Owner cope with the complexity? Do we need Architectural leadership? Does Release Planning turn into veritable contracts? Let’s look at some of these together.
We’ll use Darwin as the symbol of the evolution, how we adapt and evolve Agile for the large corporations out there, the “dinosaurs” of the IT Agile world.

Cristian Cazan

Cristian is Delivery Manager at Endava, with 15+ years’ experience in IT.
Formerly Head of Development Romania, he was spotting, attracting and managing over 160 IT professionals in 2 delivery locations
Cristian is an Agile expert, Certified Scrum Master, with wide consultancy experience in enterprise agile.

George Anghelache

George is Group Delivery Manager at Endava, with 15+ years’ experience in IT.
Formerly Projects Delivery Manager and Head of PM, he had overseen good delivery of all Endava projects from a RO base.
George is an Agile expert, consulting blue-chip clients in implementing near-shore distributed agile.

THE PRODUCT OWNER - THE CATALYST OF A RELIABLE AGILE TRANSFORMATION

The major condition for a reliable Agile transformation of organizations is the involvement of business stakeholders. Starting from this vision, this session describes one of the experiences of Agile transformation - with our moments of "sweet victory" and "disenchantment"- that was initiated with business representatives that created the community of product owners. The used framework - our "play in 5 acts" is called ADKAR and techniques such as collaborative learning, continuous improvement, "Appreciative Inquiry" The talk describes the journey through the 5 steps of transformation.

Oana Juncu

Oana’s over 15 years of experience in Software Development and System Management led her choice to Agile, as the most effective approach for 21st century leading organizations focused on quality products delivery.
Oana acts as Agile Transformation facilitator and hands-on Agile and Lean Coach and Trainer helping teams ( from core Business to Software development and support services) to adopt Agile and related practices ( e.g Scrum to Kanban and Lean improvement techniques) . One of her focus is supporting organizations acquire Product Ownership around the value to be delivered as stated in their mission aligned to the their enterprise mission itself.
Oana participates actively in Agile French and International Community, as she strongly believes that connected knowledge is a value generator. She is a speaker in different Agile French and International conferences.

WE'RE AGILE - AND NOW WHAT?

It is said, and for good reasons, that Agile is easy to set up and get going, yet hard to do well. Ștefan's presentation deals with this conundrum both at team level and at enterprise level.
At team level, he talks about the wall most new Agile teams hit not long after embracing Agile and gives advice on how to go over it (or through it, if that’s the preferred choice!). He talks about the new wave of Agile and what it brings to teams who are stuck at the base.
At enterprise level, Ștefan talks about the answers that most managers ask about Agile, except for the one concerning the ROI: “Does Agile scale?” and “What will be the effect on the rest of the organization?”. He presents one of the frameworks for scaling Agile and draws a picture of the lean enterprise, the ultimate goal of Agile.

Ştefan Bârgăoanu

Ștefan has been working in the software industry since 1998 and is an entrepreneur in the field since 2002. He began his 10 year career as a software project manager with classic project management and then came to embrace Agile.
Now, as an Agile Coach, he accompanies teams in the journey towards high performance and the lean enterprise.
A PMP and a CSM, Ștefan is founding member and key facilitator of PMI Romania Moldova Branch and AgileWorks Iași.