Government has a reputation to spend huge budgets on IT Projects without delivering according value to end customers. In this session, you will experience how Kanban helped this Belgian government agency to deliver high quality software which enabled them to transform from a bureaucratic environment to a lightweight, change driven supplier of civil services.

Like many other companies, they started out with a standard agile framework. Factors like specialization, motivation, budgeting and slow decision making made this not the perfect fit.

Implementing a flow model with WIP limits helped the organization to focus on delivering the right stuff at the right time. Since then, it became much easier to get the business stakeholders on board and play an active role in feeding the delivery chain.

Nick Oostvogels is a consultant who has worked at different companies in various industries.
At the moment he helps teams to delivering successful projects in whatever role necessary. He is currently working for 4C Technologies, a Belgian consulting firm, often as a project manager or coach. Nick has + 3 years of hands-on experience in agile and lean and + 9 years experience in software development.

He is a proud father of a daughter and twin boys, and enjoys outdoor sports such as mountain bike, running, soccer and drinking a Duvel afterwards. Nick is a regular blogger and enjoys speaking and learning at conferences

Over the past couple of years, my colleagues and I have led dozens of implementations in a variety of companies. As we closed the second year of our company we began noticing the problems and costs incurred by the fact that we each worked differently. E.g. miscommunications, differences in outcomes, rework done between implementations. In this presentation I will show how we used S&T trees as the basis for our implementations focusing on a few case studies allowing participants to use our basic S&T tree in their own environment to either catalyze or re-energize their agile implementation

Elad Amit has been a part of the IT industry since 1998, making the shift to product development in 2001 when he formed his own software development shop specializing in e-commerce solutions along with several of his closest friends. Since then, Elad has served as an R&D Team Leader, Program Manager, and Director of Product Development.

Over the past couple of years, Elad has been serving as an Agile/Lean coach at AgileSparks, helping others in their journey towards Agility and improvement.

Today, Elad is a practicing CSM and CSPO, working with several organizations through the process of implementing agile processes and engineering practices. You can find and reach Elad at il.linkedin.com/​in/​eladamit and via elad@agilesparks.com

We've always thought that the Agile Principles and philosophy make a lot of sense. So, we thought of putting one of them to the test: deliver early and often.

We worked with a few teams and brought them to the point when they deployed every two or three days a new feature, completely tested and automatically updated. We would like to share with the audience the set of practices that we used and how they worked together to optimize the deployment cycle.

You will benefit the most from this talk if you know about agile practices. We believe that this method is especially useful for startups or companies building their own products. If you are part of a corporate environment or of a service company, you may find interesting information to consider for your organization but you may find the whole package less useful.

Alexandru Bolboaca

I like to develop software, and my history shows that I do it well. I've learned it in a real project, with a mentor who slapped my hand whenever I did something wrong. I've tried to continuously improve myself and thus choose to walk the software craftsmanship path.

I like to teach people how to program better and to work side by side with them to build innovative software or solve "impossible" problems while also leveraging their potential. I do not have all the answers, but I like to find the good ones with the help of a team. 

Currently I am working with MosaicWorks at developing the agile and software craftsmanship groups in Romania. Details of this activity are available on www.agileworks.roI also help organizing the local agile conference - www.openagile.ro

I also provide Unit Testing and Test Driven Development trainings, help groups solve their problems using value stream mapping, do technical coaching and pair programming and others. I've learned many of these techniques by practicing and discussing with much more experienced people, like JB Rainsberger, Corey Haines, David Hussman etc.. 

I am very passionate about software development; you can read about it on my website - http://www.alexbolboaca.ro

Maria Diaconu

Maria worked in software development for more than 12 years, both locally and abroad. From Software Developer, Technical Lead & Manager to Agile Practitioner & Coach, Maria is supporting quality software, Software Craftsmanship and people passionate about their craft. She talks at conferences and organizes the OpenAgile Romania conference.

Due to her last years hands-on experience of helping product teams develop the right features in the shortest time, Product Owners to build successful products and owners/managers to

better organize their companies, she can help companies with: Agile adoption (thinking incrementally & iteratively, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Software Development, Kanban & others), product planning, coaching for performance (managers, product owners and team leaders/facilitators/Scrum Masters) and lean management.