Roxana-Maria Grigore

I led the global team responsible to increase the company's ability to listen to customers and align the company's products and offering to the customers' needs. I successfully engaged team members from different locations who volunteered to contribute actively to the cultural initiative. Each team member became an active agent of change, engaging multiple colleagues. Various technology tools were used to increase the opportunity to participate and contribute: surveys, facilitated meetings, interviews, and more.

The client stepped into a new role and was facing challenges regarding product ownership hard skills (product backlog management, value delivery, and business decisions) and soft skills (how to engage the team constructively, how to handle conflicting requirements from stakeholders, effective time management, and more).
Her feedback stated that what she appreciated the most were concrete real-life examples from my own experience that opened her thinking into finding her own approach.
She has requested and received very positive feedback regarding her progress from her team members and manager while getting a new enthusiasm for the role.

The team has adopted the Agile methodology while struggling with low code quality, slow delivery, slow reaction to customer-reported bugs, plenty of fatal and urgent customer-reported bugs, low collaboration with other teams, lack of focus, and almost zero understanding of the user's environment and needs, and lack of strategic decisions. The team aggressively implemented improvements leading to successful deliveries while greatly increasing the morale. I supported different team members to take initiatives at the company level—clean code academia, strategy clarifications, and agile testing community of practice—once the context of the team also needed to change.

I coached a startup founder and the existing staff on agile values and principles, scrum, and agile leadership, inspiring them to challenge the status quo and choose the practices that fit better into their context and culture. I mentored high-performance self-organized teams, increasing psychological safety, collaboration, and intrinsic motivation. I also guided on adopting the necessary formalities and structures for sustainable company growth while maintaining an open and innovative culture, learning and improving all the time.

The formal project manager of a small team was willing to experiment with agile in order to improve team collaboration, morale, and performance.

As a technical leader of the team working on a ship monitoring application, I had to collaborate with several other development teams who would provide the sensors data for the application. Doing that, I noticed that each team had a different technical solution to provide or receive data from other teams, leading to a "spaghetti" architecture. I initiated the discussions on creating a common communication tool, proposed a technical solution, and made a business case on why this standardized communication would reduce development complexity and cost and even bring customer benefits. The project was approved by the management. The technical solution was improved by collaborating with the technical leaders of other teams, considering that applications were using different technologies (Java/C++/.NET). The solution is used until today without major modifications.