Bogdan Iordache is the organizer of How to Web, one of the most important web events in Eastern Europe, focused on web entrepreneurship and business on the web.

After finishing his studies he started Stagii pe Bune, the oldest and still the biggest IT-focused internship program in Romania and Conectoo, an email marketing platform targeting online publishers.

In 2009 he started How to Web, helping Eastern European entrepreneurs find the inspiration, connections and knowledge they need for developing their businesses. The first international edition of How to Web won the IDG’s “Best Romanian IT&C event of the year” award.

Bogdan holds a degree in Engineering from the Computer Science department of theUniversity “Politehnica” of Bucharest and also a DEA degree from the University “Lumiere” of Lyon.

Topic: Eastern Europe’s hacker culture

Almost Every time I present myself to a tech guy from UK or Germany as Romanian, the next line is “Romania ! Wow, you’ve got great programmers !”. However, I’ve never heard somebody saying “Romania ! Wow, you’ve got great entrepreneurs !” Why are we good programmers ? What are the values and the causes that have made Eastern Europe an outsourcing destination, rather than an intellectual property creator ?

Richard is a keen programmer and software architect, and works as the Head of Development for Endava. By day he helps shape Agile projects for some of the world’s largest financial services customers, by night he enjoys quality geek time and engineering hearty meals. Thanks to his New Zealand heritage he feels his passion for rugby gives him an instant affinity to Scrum – be warned, his talks are likely to contain tenuous references to the All Blacks.

Topic: Looking Outside the Scrum – Building Cross-Organisational Teams

The success of an Agile project depends on much more than a finely tuned scrum. The way in which customers contribute to the Agile process, the relationships they have with the scrum, and the way the scrum understands and responds to the customer’s needs implies a team structure far beyond that of a standard delivery team.

Richard uses his experience building distributed scrums for the enterprise to examine concepts such as business strategy, software design, and operational support and how it applies when developing software in large organisations, and how the concept of teamwork is just as important outside the scrum as it is inside.

Catalin is a software engineer by education and has extensive experience as a C++ developer, mostly on Windows systems. After moving to project management and being defeated by Gantts he grasped onto Scrum and Agile and has not let go ever since. Right now he is acting as a line manager in an Agile organization, which sometimes may be very hard to quantify and justify.

Because of that he tries to make use of his developer and designer skills as much as possible and generally talk his way out of trouble.  When not at work you may find him spending time with his family, doing a bit of work-out, reading a good comic book or watching a smart TED presentation.

Topic: The Pain of Doing Scrum

Some of you may have experienced resistance within your organization while migrating to Agile. Sometimes it may just be normal everyday resistance-to-change-of-any-kind syndrome, but sometimes it feels like there is something special about this type of methodologies, which frightens management and teams alike.

What if there are a lot of issues and a lot of resistance.Is there a panacea to heal all of these hurts or should one find specialized treatment for each symptom? Are good practices enough to keep the reform fueled at the time when the going inherently gets rough? And ultimately is it worth all the pain?

In this short presentation we will try to go over these questions and some of the real-life pains and hurts experienced by an organization putting in practice an apparently simple thing like Scrum.

Johan Lybaert is Sector Manager at Cegeka. He has more than 29 year experience in delivery of IT projects. He has always be adept of using the relevant methodology and development practices to deliver in a successful way his projects.

Johan  was responsible for the Program Ventouris, the biggest J2EE project (30 manyear) in the Benelux that has been developed following the agile development approach. The Ventouris project is a development of a complex administrative application that as a product need to be used by 8 different customers, each customer with the same mission but different in size and different in internal business processes.

He has been speaker at Javapolis 2005, 2006 with as presentation topic : lessons learned of applying agile development practices on a large project ‘ Ventouris’, and in 2007 on ‘customer collaboration’ – the BMW case. He has been speaker on the XP-days.

The agile development approach has been introduced within Cegeka on Ventouris in 2005. Today Cegeka is using scrum & XP practices on all are projects with as result delighted customers, getting the system they really want within the agreed budget and timing. Recently they started working with distributed teams in Romania.

Today Johan is the chairman of the Belgium Chapter of the Agile Consortium see www.agileconsortium.be

Learn more info about www.cegeka.be

Topic: Turning IT into Strategic Advantage

The presentation is a real project story of Ventouris. Ventouris is one of the biggest J2EE software development projects in Belgium (30.000 mandays – 4 years). The Ventouris product is a custom build software for 8 customers all responsible for the social security administration of the self-employed people in Belgium.

Cegeka took this project as an opportunity to move from RUP methodology towards Agile Methodology. We will explain the reasons why this move was a good risk mitigation and how we applied all the scrum and XP practices on a large scale.

Today this software product Ventouris is already 3 years in production and we have very satisfied customers which receives a new release every 2 weeks. The software team is using for the maintenance also Kanban best practices to manage this. Last year we worked on, Ventouris in a distributed scrum team with Romania – also this topic will be covered.

Radu is a dad, ex-lead vocals in a punk rock band, enthusiastic photographer, web specialist and Agile team architect. He worked for more than 10 years helping development teams to discover new ways of delivering quality software. For more than 3 years he was focused in doing this in an Agile way.

Getting deep understanding and practicing better Agile becomes his main goal. Leading and facilitating a natural growth of a group into powerful team becomes his great passion. For him, team architect is that special position that generates and sustain beautiful teams. It’s about understanding pillars, creating bondings and generate structures, all in the benefit of the people.

Topic: Agile Adoption Obstacles

Agile adoption is a though but rewarding journey. Change agents have a difficult task in facilitating these adoptions. Knowing Agile methodology and a lot of energy are great starting points. Understanding and being aware about potential obstacles it’s the next logical step.

This talk is about that Agile adoption obstacles that Radu faced in practice over the years, along with some humble advices. It’s not a success guarantee to do list, but is a good checklist that can be consulted when you facilitate an Agile adoption.

I am a software engineer with significant experience in developing and supporting open source projects. Over the last few years I have learned many important lessons about how to be a valuable member of a distributed team and about how to encourage collaboration, lessons that I want to share with you.

Topic: Building a Great Team Around an Open Source Project

More and more companies are making some of their projects open source but fail at creating an active & supportive community that can drive the development process. Are they doing something wrong? What can you do to keep the community engaged? Does it make sense from a business perspective to develop products as open source? This is a talk that wants to bring to your attention some of practices that give good results when your are trying to bootstrap a community around an open source project.

Jurgen is Europe’s agile management expert. Not only he talks, writes and teaches about it, but he put it into practice by igniting the Agile Lean Europe community, and then stepping down as it self-organized and produced its first conference. He is a friend of our conference, being a large part of the 2009 edition.

Topic: How to Change the World

“How do I make my managers more Agile?”
“How can I convince developers to educate themselves?”
“How can I make customers more cooperative?”
“How do I start a European network of Agile and Lean practitioners?”

When transforming organizations and other social systems people usually encounter obstacles. And these obstacles very often involve changing other people’s behaviors. Of course, we cannot really _make_ people behave in a different way. We also cannot really make people laugh, and we cannot really make people happy. But… we can certainly try!

This session is about Change Management 3.0. It is a new change management “super model” which views organizations as complex adaptive systems and social networks. The Change Management 3.0 supermodel wraps various existing models (PDCA, ADKAR, Adoption Curve and The 5 I’s). It lists a few dozen hard questions that can help people in their attempts to change the behaviors of other people in an organization and beyond.

No matter whether you are a manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, software developer or writer, anyone will find it useful to know how to change the world around them.

Read more about Jurgen here.

Everyone who knows David Hussman, aka “The Dude”, knows that he is a modest, pragmatic and helpful person and coach. He is a wizard of social dynamics; he understands everyone and is able to facilitate the birth of new ideas and approaches. He loves coming back to Romania because of our vibrant and young community.

Topic: From Preaching and Training to Teaching and Learning

Gone are the days where a band of rebels migrated towards agile as a term to convey the value of their newer, lightweight processes. Yesterday’s rebellion is today’s solution to the rapidly changing eco-systems most software producers face. As more people choose agile practices as tools for discovering and delivering products, the voice of the those early rebels is fading in ways that are both inevitable and dangerous. Join me in the challenge of pragmatically finding tools and talk that preserve the spirit of the rebels as we grow the movement. The time is now.

Read about David here.