One of trainings that we had this summer, during our Qubiz Academy programme, was “Agile & Scrum and Social Media Seminar”, a training for professionals, students and teachers from the IT domain.
The seminar has been held at “Gheorghe Sincai” Local Library in Oradea, in 14th of July - having an audience of more than 80 people - by our partners from Netherlands, Fred Kwakkel, owner of Qubiz NL and Hans Hamhuis, co-owner of Mitch Partners.
During the first part of the presentation, Hans revealed the basics of Agile and agile development and Basics of the Scrum framework, such as: Scrum Process (ceremonies), Scrum Roles or Scrum Backlogs.
Hans has gained extensive experience as a Business Intelligence / Management consultant, project manager, information systems auditor and trainer at large and mid-size organizations. He is an independent consulting firm that helps organizations to be successful in the use of information by developing necessary knowledge, skills and partnerships within the organization. Also, Hans finds it challenging to improve the collaboration within and performance of teams. Hans has experience with RAD and DSDM and worked as team lead improving the working processes. That is why Agile and Scrum have his warm interest. Over the past year Hans has introduced Scrum and Agile working to a mid-sized insurance company and implemented it in a change program that redesigns all client processes. He coaches the program management and product owners on Scrum. He is also Scrum Master of the development team that designs and develops the new customer processes. Hans is certified Scrum Master.
In the second part of the seminar, Fred shared his experience with Social Media with the participants; in his opinion: "Social media is your way to contribute to the world around you and get something in return: it's about creation, collaboration, connection, community, convergence and many more C's. In this presentation I will share my personal experiences with social media to make you benefit". Fred is an experienced dutch business consultant, project manager with a drive for high quality system development. He is always looking for technology innovations and thrives to see Business and IT work better together. Only by collaboration and cooperation he believes projects bring the needed business value. Fred thinks that this seminar was a great opportunity by “Getting a chance to meet more people around the Qubiz++ community - like some bloggers - after the presentation at the library.”
We have also some opinions from the participants, so their feedback help us to improve, to push us to organize other events:
“It was definitely worth to visit your seminar, however I was missing concrete presentation of Agile and Scrum, sosomething like how is it really working in the real life. Scrum is something new for me and for my company so the presentation gave me a clue and a very general overview of it. The second presentation was also interesting, however there were few to no new things at all; presenting what is social media itself can hardly tell any new stuffs to developers working with it already. It was useful to keep in mind what's the whole point of it, but for us as a company the questions that are raising at our end are: how to take advantage of social media, how to use it for branding, how to make money of it, how a paid campaign should be done if any on Facebook, how to measure ROI and so on." - Lorand
"I think that Scrum is an interesting method, so i will start for instance in my service team with: Daily Scrum. Each day - a daily scrum, with specific guidelines: the meeting starts precisely on time, all are welcome, but normally only the core roles speak, the meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes, the meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day. During the meeting, each team member answers three questions: What have you done since yesterday?, What are you planning to do today?, Do you have any problems that would prevent you from accomplishing your goal? Also, I understand the distinction of social media from industrial media, I understand that social media means communication on both side, I understand the importance of feedback, so I will not be afraid of interaction to say / to write what i am thinking” - John