Biography
Sjerk Van Riel
After being graduated as 'Master Applied Economics' at the University of Antwerp, I worked from 1998 untill 2008 for a Belgian ICT company,
I learned and experienced, with the teams I was part of, how to successfully implement tailored software projects. Whether it was as developer, as analyst, or as project leader, my focus and interest has always been the involvement and participation of the customer and end-users !
Since 2008, I work as an independent consultant, favoring agile principles and methodologies, I have been taking part in several Scrum software projects as Product Owner or Scrum Master.
Besides this, I occasionally organize agile workshops for businesses involved in tailored software projects.
End users have a big impact on the success or failure of software projects. I want to coach them so that they know how to contribute to success, meaning getting the applications they want.
Work experience
Cronos / Syntra Vlaanderen, Scrum Product Owner
November 2011 - Present, Brussels, Belgium
Software project at Syntra Vlaanderen
- Refactoring business processes and activities
- Leading and negotiating stakeholder workshops
- Product roadmap and release planning
- Iteratively breaking down business activities into testable features (user stories).
- Promoting agile by involving stakeholders and key users
- Functional ‘just in time’ analysis
(Defining functional acceptance tests)
(Prototyping, sketching )
- Managing product backlog iteratively
(Defining labels and epics)
(Splitting stories)
(Story mapping)
(Prioritizing based on business value)
- Functional and usability testing
- Promoting and processing fast user feedback loops
- Release monitoring
Contribute / FOD, Scrum Product Owner
June 2011 - November 2011, Brussels, Belgium
Project at FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SERVICE (FOD) - PUBLIC HEALTH
- Managing product roadmap
- Analysing business processes and business activities.
- Managing and prioritizing product backlog
- Iteratively breaking down business activities into testable user stories.
- Prototyping (wireframes / sketches / scenarios)
- Requirements elicitation by interviews and product demos.
- Sprint planning
- Defining acceptance tests.
- Functional and usability testing.
- Representing business within development team.
- Introducing agile principles (e.g. self-organizing team) and Scrum (e.g. retrospectives) to the development team
Cronos / European Commission, Scrum Master
September 2008 - June 2011, Brussels, Belgium
Software project at European Commission
- Setup agile project organization
- Converting traditional project methodology towards iterative (Scrum) approach
- Project planning and estimating
- Encouraging team to setup an agile technical environment (TDD, CI)
- Encouraging XP practices, like pair programming
- Convincing (step by step) customer for agile approaches
(Convincing by results)
- Release and sprint planning
- Product demos to get user feedback
- Team retrospectives
- Project monitoring
- Translating user needs & high level specification into detailed user stories / test scenario’s.
- Functional testing
- Customer demo’s and project follow up
Axi, Developer - Analyst
April 1998 - April 2008, Willebroek, Belgium
Several tailor made software projects.
Sectors : government / maritime transport / pharmaceutical
Technologies : Oracle and Java