Scrum Alliance - Profile: Tiago Garcez

bio:

Tiago Garcez - I am an independent consultant working through Agilar and focused on implementing Agile practices in organizations. With a backgroun... Read More

Tiago Garcez - I am an independent consultant working through Agilar and focused on implementing Agile practices in organizations. With a background in Business Administration and an MBA in Change Management, I have over 10 years of experience in Project Management and Business Analysis. I became actively involved with Agile in 2008 and saw it as a way out of the "illusion of control" - one of the major causes for frustration in the various implementation projects I had worked on up to that point (thick requirements documents and massive MS Project files).

After working as a Product Owner at the Belgian Post (now bpost) for over 2 years, I am currently working as a Agile Coach for Belgacom, helping them introduce Scrum into their organization. This involves introducing Scrum to delivery teams, project managers (Scrum Masters) and business (Product Owners), helping them setup their backlog and then coaching the team throughout the delivery of the project.

Although I am based out of Brussels, Belgium, I am originally from Sao Paulo Brazil. I have presented talks at the last two South American Agile conferences (Agiles) - 2009 in Florianopolis, Brazil and 2010 in Lima, Peru. Both talks focused on the challenges in adopting Scrum in large organizations, focusing specifically on my experiences with the Belgian Post (a former state owned monopoly, no less!). This is one of the topics I'm passionate about - understanding the challenges and frictions faced when implementing an Agile mentality (and its associated processes) in a large organization, and developing practices and solutions that enable this transition.

I'm also an active member in the Agile Belgium community and have been helping small development companies (< 50 employees) in the Brussels and Antwerp area in their adoption of Agile practices. Lately I have also been advising project managers in one of the largest financial newspapers in Belgium as they adopted some Agile techniques (mainly iterations and visual management) in their marketing projects.

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work:

Agile Coach at Belgacom

I am a member of the "Enterprise Scrum" team at Belgacom and our objective is to support the implementation of Scrum throughout the organization.

My responsibilities as Agile Coach involve introducing Scrum to developers, project managers (Scrum Masters) and business (Product Owners), helping them in setting up and prioritizing their Product backlog and then coaching the project for its duration. This includes facilitating workshops, retrospectives and coaching the members of the project team to ensure they are learning the benefits of Scrum and how to "do it themselves" the next time around.

I am also the Scrum Master for the Enterprise Scrum Team (composed of all the Scrum coaches and representatives of PMO, Operations and Standards), which is responsible for the implementation of the Scrum initiative at Belgacom. I facilitate our stand-ups, demos and retrospectives and ensure we're collaborating and delivering our stories. As part of my responsibilities in the Enterprise Scrum Team I also work closely with line and domain managers to make sure they understand how they can support their Scrum teams and also benefit from the project information being provided by the Scrum project metrics.

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2011-Present

Product Owner / Scrum Master at bpost

Initially I was the Product Owner for the Tracked Mail team (development team responsible for all the Track & Trace applications at bpost) and I acted as a proxy to the various business units whose projects required work from this team. I managed the Product Backlog and facilitated workshops between the business, architecture and the development team in order to define, estimate and prioritize user stories.

After a re-organization at the end of 2009, I became the Scrum Master for the team in 2010 and kept that role until I left in January 2011.

The Tracked Mail team was responsible for a total of 16 applications (mostly Java). Though the size of the team varied as we went through some budget changes, it was always between 12 - 24 members. Most were developers, but we also had testers, functional analysts and an architect in the team. We were organized into 2-4 sub-teams (depending on the size of the team at the time) and from January 2010 part of our team became a near-shore team in Romania.

We used Scrum throughout my entire time there.

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2008-2011