Nenad Despic, Project Manager in Niš, Serbia
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Nenad Despic

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Bio

Nenad has more than 13 years of experience as a project manager, delivery manager, and scrum master. As an expert in Agile software development, he has led teams to achieve their maximum productivity through the stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Nenad strives to create a culture that values and rewards team success, promotes innovation culture, and maintains stable teams.

Project Highlights

Job Fair 09 Internship — Your Career Starts Here
Led 30+ volunteers across multiple teams, including corporate relations, marketing, fundraising, IT, and logistics, to support and organize one of the largest job fairs in southern Serbia for students from the University of Nis.
Online Betting Platform (NDA)
Led two development teams to deliver a MVP solution for an online betting platform.
Mobile App for Marketing Campaign (NDA)
Led a development team that built an Android mobile application for our client's marketing campaign.

Expertise

  • Agile Delivery
  • Agile Project Management
  • Agile Scaling Frameworks
  • Communication
  • Kanban
  • Scrum
  • Sprints
  • Time Management

Work Experience

Servant Team Lead / Scrum Master

2021 - PRESENT
Netconomy
  • Involved in leadership/coaching and training/facilitation/impediments management.
  • Supported one or more scrum teams as a servant team lead and helped them grow.
  • Acted as a coach and trainer for Agile working methods and approaches on a team and organizational level.
  • Introduced Agile processes and developed them further.
  • Moderated workshops and scrum meetings and monitored the progress of the sprint.
  • Promoted effective and constructive communication and provided support in eliminating impediments.

Scrum Master

2018 - 2021
enjoy.ing
  • Analyzed necessary changes to the platform and specific surrounding systems, ensuring the service integration met the business and strategic requirements.
  • Prepared, moderated, and followed up on regular scrum ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, sprint and release planning sessions, and sprint reviews and retrospectives.
  • Facilitated discussions, decision-making, and conflict resolution.
  • Reviewed day-to-day progress of the project(s) and released initiatives regarding time, budget, scope, and quality. Provided high-quality integration support.

Scrum Master

2017 - 2018
Telenor Group
  • Managed scrum ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, sprint and release planning sessions, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.
  • Removed impediments and guided teams to find the right strategy for removing them.
  • Facilitated cross-teams and organizational dependencies to ensure the decision-making and conflict resolution were on time.
  • Assessed the Scrum team maturity and coached teams to increase the maturity levels at a sustainable and comfortable pace for all.
  • Tracked progress of teams' project scope and worked with product owners to create change orders for additional requirements.

Scrum Master

2016 - 2017
Humanity
  • Maintained culture and environment to optimize the return on investment (ROI).
  • Managed the relationship between business product owners and development teams.
  • Prepared, supervised, and ensured regular scrum ceremonies: daily stand-ups, sprint and release planning sessions, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.
  • Identified impediments in the development environment and worked closely with teams to resolve them.
  • Enabled close cooperation across all roles and functions.
  • Coached teams on Agile practices and shielded teams from external interferences.

Project Manager

2015 - 2016
Levi9 Technology Services
  • Planned, organized, led, and motivated the team to achieve objectives and safeguard effective service delivery.
  • Managed projects' budget, scope, quality, issues, and risks.
  • Overcame the communication gap between business requirements and technical specifications.
  • Built and maintained customer relationships and administered service accounts.
  • Ensured the required service quality as agreed in the contracts.
  • Guided the team and organization on how to use Agile and Scrum practices and values.
  • Promoted discussions, decision-making, and conflict resolution.

Project Manager | Scrum Master

2011 - 2015
Seavus
  • Managed software development projects in various business domains using Agile and adaptive software development lifecycle.
  • Identified, developed, and implemented business goals and strategies.
  • Planned, coordinated, and performed project operations assigned by the supervisor or other relevant parties.
  • Empowered collaboration within the teams on different projects.
  • Conducted appropriate contacts and relations with public and private organizations and institutions that led to achieving the company's strategic goals.
  • Coached teams and the organization on Agile and Scrum practices and values.
  • Supported teams using a servant leadership style whenever possible and led by example.

Project History

Job Fair 09 Internship — Your Career Starts Here

http://www.jobfairnis.rs

Led 30+ volunteers across multiple teams, including corporate relations, marketing, fundraising, IT, and logistics, to support and organize one of the largest job fairs in southern Serbia for students from the University of Nis.

As part of the fair, I organized a local engineering competition for students and an information technology quiz for high school students.

Project results:
• The City of Nis as a general sponsor
• 15 companies participated
• Over 1200 visitors
• 750 CVs in the database

Online Betting Platform (NDA)

Led two development teams to deliver a MVP solution for an online betting platform.

The company's platform is one of the biggest bet gaming service providers in the world. Although the company was initially built as a service facing end-users, it started getting requests for a B2B service after several years of growth. The idea was to redevelop the company to become a gaming service provider, a platform that anyone can connect to and deliver the same gaming experience.

Multiple challenges occurred during planning this business strategy migration. The biggest one seemed to be the lack of qualified and expert developers who could understand the issue and deliver the solution.

As an agile project manager, I led two development teams using the Scrum framework while the client tested the setup. Since the client wasn't doing any service development, our team delivered the next development batch on our own. The client was impressed with both the expertise shown by our team and the way we have delivered the solution.

Technologies used in this project included Jakarta EE, Tapestry, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, Hibernate, JUnit, and JBoss.

Mobile App for Marketing Campaign (NDA)

Led a development team that built an Android mobile application for our client's marketing campaign.

Our client posed several challenges such as strict deadlines due to the worldwide launch of competitive marketing campaigns, design changes up to the milestone deadlines as dictated by the marketing agency in charge of the entire campaign, and unsupported technologies at the time.

Our company decided on an architecture solution and together with our software architects, placed the design solution that can cope with the expected number of users. The unsupported integration with third-party services was done in-house and focused on functionality and performance.

As an agile project manager, I led the team that has developed the mobile application as per the client’s request in a short deadline of five weeks. The deliveries were done in short milestone time intervals so that all affected parties can do the reviews before the Android market launch. The client’s QA team only did verifications as their extensive testing reported no issues.

The client received the full-featured application on time that followed the design proposal from the marketing agency in charge of their global marketing campaign.

Technologies used in this project included Java (Android), jQuery, CSS, and web services.

Education

2005 - 2012

Bachelor's Degree in Software Engineering

Faculty of Electronic Engineering - Nis, Serbia

Certifications

MARCH 2023 - PRESENT

Advanced Certified ScrumMaster

Scrum Alliance

MAY 2022 - PRESENT

Certified ScrumMaster

Scrum Alliance

MARCH 2017 - PRESENT

NLP Business Practitioner

International Association for Neuro-Linguistic Programming

DECEMBER 2015 - PRESENT

Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)

Scrum.org

Skills

Tools

Trello, Confluence, Skype, Jira, Zoom, Office 365, Atlassian Suite

Paradigms

Scrum, Agile Project Management, Agile, Agile Delivery, Kanban, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Object-oriented Design (OOD), Human-computer Interaction (HCI), Testing, Agile Leadership

Platforms

SharePoint

Other

Project Management, Sprints, Microsoft Office, Communication, Flexibility, Planning, Contract Negotiation, Progress Reporting, Dropbox, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Data Structures, Databases, Computer Networking, Web Programming, Distributed Systems, Mobile, Graphics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Java, C, C++, PHP, Scrum Master, Goal Management, Business Agility, Agile Scaling Frameworks, Time Management, Facilitation, Moderation, Coaching, Leadership

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