Remote Startup Management Consultant
2018 - PRESENTToptal Client- Helped startup founders and managers build their teams, engage their staff, achieve business results, delight customers, deliver innovative tech solutions, and shape culture.
- Consulted tech startup founders on strategic staffing decisions: hiring, outsourcing, building partnerships, offshore, developing internal competencies, vendors analysis, and comparison.
- Supported founders in creating business proposals and business cases for strategic MVPs and calculating ROI.
- Coached on prioritizing requirements, validating customer needs hypotheses, discovering customer value, and launching MVP.
- Consulted management decisions regarding technology and business initiatives aligned with the startup's growth strategy.
- Defined the screening process for recruiting Agile coaches, product owners, scrum masters, and other team roles.
- Suggested creative solutions to reduce and mitigate risk and handle uncertainty by applying empirical models.
Freelance Agile Coach and Consultant
2017 - PRESENTToptal Clients- Trained scrum masters, and technology and business managers on people skills and transformation leadership, building high-performing teams.
- Coached scrum masters. product owners, transitioning project managers, and other IT, business leaders, and teams towards the mindset of a learning organization, able to adapt fast to market changes.
- Guided on how to increase the customers' delight and optimize the end-to-end value chain.
- Suggested creative solutions to mitigate risk and reduce uncertainty by applying empirical models.
- Consulted top management decisions regarding agile adoption and transformation, technology strategy, and outsourcing/insourcing approaches.
- Developed frameworks for HR and technology management regarding performance reviews, career tracks, OKRs, and other target systems, recruitment, and job descriptions.
- Partnered on creativity and innovation tools to build the environment for safe experimentation.
- Facilitated problem-solving cross-silos, cross-cultural, and cross-hierarchy for win-win solutions leading to a high-performing system.
Director of Agile Coaching
2017 - 2017Adidas | Digital Brand Commerce- Consulted executive stakeholders regarding agile initiatives in digital brand commerce, a department with more than 500 business and IT experts responsible for all consumer-facing Adidas software products.
- Served as the line manager of two agile coaches, collaborating with five other external coaches in 45 development teams.
- Supported the agile transformation core team and the volunteered working teams focused on delivering transformation key enablers.
- Developed the agile coaching strategy in collaboration with business and IT stakeholders to be applied cross-teams, cross-hierarchy, and cross-location.
- Advised management on the outsourcing strategy in line with Agile considerations and the transition of Waterfall projects to Agile, including timing, prerequisites, risks, budget impact, and team composition impact.
- Consulted key executive stakeholders, including the VP of digital IT, in his agile transformation executive sponsor role.
- Guided the agile transformation initiative on the executive level for the software department across Germany, Netherlands, and Spain.
- Initiated the scrum masters’ community of practice and the Agile coaching forum.
Technology Agile Line Manager as Country Manager
2013 - 2017NAPA Romania- Increased staff performance each year (79.8 in 2016), beyond the global expert norm of 65.8 by applying agile values, principles, and practices. Reported directly to the CTO.
- Facilitated the bottom-up creation of the technology unit strategy.
- Led the global customer experience (CX) team to raise the net promoter score from 16 to 25 (target 20) with a volunteered cross-functional involvement of the staff.
- Consulted the development of IT's agile career tracks and job descriptions in harmony with cross-cultural expectations between Finland, Romania, and India. Career tracks were seen as beneficial by 41.2% and very beneficial by 11.8% of the staff.
- Defined the agile performance evaluation process by distributing self-assessment forms, resulting in feedback that people feel more engaged with their work (47.1%) and equally highly engaged (52.9%).
- Collaborated with the HR manager and financial manager to adapt the target setting practices and competencies development and the salary system to Agile.
- Contributed to the company's label as the first employer of choice in IT in the city, after building a referral-based recruitment system, universities' collaboration, and conferences' participation (brain spotting public report available on request).
- Accomplished excellent staff survey results each year, measured by an external partner survey: commitment index 2015–78; leadership index 2015–73.9; engagement index 2015–84.6. The global expert norm is 72.8, 70.5, and 75.8, respectively.
- Supported competency development by introducing a competency analysis framework, one-on-one development discussions, and mentorship and soft skills programs. Index raised from 0.01 (2013) to 0.13 (2014) and 0.23 (2015) measured by an external survey.
- Started as the first employee in Romania, growing the team from 18 to 32 experts as the line manager.
Scrum Master
2012 - 2013NAPA Romania- Introduced Scrum practices and Agile values, principles, and practices while serving as a scrum master selected through team voting.
- Received company reward as a high-performance team for delivering significant new development while continuously improving code quality.
- Coached the team and stimulated it to find its own agile flavor according to its unique context and membership.
- Initiated the scrum masters' community of practice.
- Removed impediments and aggressively supported improvement initiatives, completing a total of 103 improvements.
- Supported the collaboration with other teams by initiating the scrum of scrums.
Technical Team Leader | Lead Software Developer
2008 - 2013NAPA Romania- Led the automated migration from Java to C# of two NAPA projects, using the open-source project 2 CSharp Translator for Eclipse.
- Initiated and facilitated the cross-teams implementation of NAPA Bus, the communication tool between all NAPA products implemented with ActiveMQ.
- Developed NAPA Real-Time Monitoring, an application for monitoring the sensors onboard the ships using the .NET platform.
- Contributed to the development of a web business intelligence tool for fleet management implemented in JAVA, Microsoft database, and Pentaho platforms.
- Introduced code quality practices, including refactoring, automated testing, and increased code coverage, leading to fewer customer-reported bugs.
- Trained and offered technical onboarding to junior team members joining the company as trainees.
- Maintained and improved the Joint Bulkcarrier Project software used by the American Bureau of Shipping.
Senior Software Developer and Backup Component Leader
2007 - 2008SIVECO Romania- Implemented a component for the Romanian health integrated system in Java with Oracle databases following the Waterfall methodology and practices.
- Developed overrides for the source code automatically generated by the MDA framework (Java sources, JSP sources, and Oracle scripts).
- Documented specific software requirements based on the legal constraints regarding contracts made between the National Health Insurance Found and the private providers of medical services.
- Verified the test cases elaborated by the testing team.
- Tested the integrated version of the software and discovered more than 100 bugs that were fixed until the scheduled release date.
Software Developer
2005 - 2006Pentalog iNet- Maintained a proactive communication between the clients located in France and the local outsourced team.
- Developed the evolution of a generic synchronization engine used for synchronizing XML files, CSV files, and Oracle databases.
- Developed a module for the automatic scheduling of the synchronization processes with an evolved system of processes dependency.
- Integrated Kettle as an open-source ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) in the Java client application.
- Delivered multiple PL/SQL scripts for the maintenance of the Oracle databases and solving fatal bugs.
- Analyzed and proposed different technical solutions based on open-source tools to the clients.
- Elaborated functional, installation, technical and user guides in French.