Marian Razvan Brinzila

For a product in the financial sector, I supported, mentored, and coached 12 developers to embrace the T-Shaped skills model, allowing them to deploy and maintain the production platform, in addition to developing the software.

The mindset shift challenge was far superior to the technical knowledge acquisition, which allowed evolving towards infrastructure as code, continuous integration, testing, and deployment with a reduction in cycle time and increased quality.

I am paraphrasing a few fragments from the article:

"Agile is often a misunderstood concept. Let's look at it as if it was a lens, a filter to use when analyzing and making decisions. That's all there is, a set of values and principles to consider when making decisions. And it is powerful because it was born from experience. It is also difficult to put in place because it requires a mindset shift. I will also tell you that your company is already agile to a certain degree. There is no such thing as 0% agile or 100% agile. You can't switch to agile; just consider its values and principles increasingly more in your context. Train your organization to do this."

"... the mindset change takes time. And like any change, it causes resistance unless the actors see the benefits of the change. It is my role to organize the transformation. I will use a coaching approach, starting with aligning expectations, designing the transformation alliance together, designing the actions in all transparency and collaboration."

I have yet to witness a group of people that refuse to define the improvements of their work when genuinely invited to do so by the "traditional" management, and they can hold accountable all those involved."

While supporting three development teams to increase their process efficiency, measuring the current state and the evolution was a key element. Using Azure DevOps analytics view as input, I developed a Power BI model to visualize the required metrics with ease.

These include value stream mapping, cycle time, lead time, process efficiency, volumes, velocity, time tracking and estimation accuracy, user engagement, developers proactivity.

Having real-time access to data allowed the management and the teams to make decisions, measure, and use the feedback loop efficiently.