Our team of consultants consists of a number of agile business analysts, agile user experience designers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Scrum Trainers, Coaches and very experienced agile software development specialists. These development teams consist of experienced and very experienced IT experts and are divided into different specialties, domains and technologies.
We use and have knowledge off multiple project management tools.
Our consultants have in depth knowledge of at least one of the following tools in order to manage your project:
Atlassian (Jira, Greenhopper, Confluence and many add-ons), Pivotaltracker, TinyPM, TargetProcess, VersionOne, RallyDev, and many more…
Our belief is that creating the right development team and a collaborative environment is the most important aspect in creating software but at the same time technology is an important aspect as well. Using the right technology for developing a solution can shorten delivery cycle tremendously and at the same time can create some very valuable offering to the users. Equalminds believes in innovation and in adopting and executing solutions based on new and advanced technologies.
We offer custom software development solutions using an array of technologies and agile methods. We have a large network of agile technology experts who know how to develop in an agile way.
Microsoft Technologies:
C#,ASP.NET, Silverlight, WCF,WPF,WWF, Sharepoint, Sitecore
Java Technologies:
Core Java, J2EE, J2ME, Frameworks like Oracle ADF, Sprint, Hibernate.
Open Source:
PHP, Drupal, WordPress, Umbraco, Liferay, HTML5, JQuery, JavaScript, …,
Mobile Application Development:
Cross Platform Development for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, PhoneGap, HTML5, Moble JQuery, Sencha Touch
Databases:
Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle Server, MySQL
Equalminds contributes to improvement of your software development practices to a number of professionals and organisations. We offer courses in the field of Scrum/Agile and eXtreme Programming. The courses are taught by highly experienced trainers who work every day with teams and projects working on Agile or related technologies.
We offer both Corporate trainings for Organizations looking to go Agile and also Public trainings which are open to individual registration. Equaliminds offers a breadth and depth of courses to help you meet your needs.
Your team is the crucial in running Agile. We believe a development team can learn to become Agile by creating a learning experience. Equalminds created a training for developers to be able to run as an Agile team
You want a team:
On a 2-day course we let your developers experience what these skills mean in the succes and failure of real live projects. We will simulate a real development project. In this project we will learn the team to change their way of working in order to succesfully build software the business wants.
This 2-day course lays a solid foundation for individuals or teams to begin effectively using Scrum immediately. The Scrum framework, mechanics, and roles are emphasized with a focus on practical application. Whether you are brand new to Scrum or been practicing Scrum “under the radar” for some time, this course will level-set your team’s understanding and help you achieve higher goals by focusing on the fundamentals of lean principles and agility. This course will provides information and tools that you can use to ensure that Scrum is understood and implemented effectively by your team. This course covers Scrum basics, including the framework, mechanics, and roles of Scrum. But it also teaches how to use Scrum to optimize value, productivity, and the total cost of ownership of software products. Students learn through instruction and team-based exercises, and are challenged to think on their feet so they can put their knowledge to immediate use.
Audience
This course is specifically targeted to Scrum Masters. The roles that typically gain the most benefit from this course are:
• Development managers of all levels
• Technical Leads and software engineers
• QA leads
• Project and Program Managers
The lessons covered in this course are applicable to anyone in a role that supports a team’s efficiency, effectiveness, and continual improvement.
Prerequisites
Attendees will be able to benefit the most from this class if they:
• Understand the basics of project management and requirements decomposition
• Have a desire to assume a greater leadership role on projects
Outline
1. Reasons for doing Scrum
2. Scrum Mechanics
3. Key Roles
4. Lean Definition
5. Scaling Scrum
6. Project Preparation
7. User Stories and acceptance tests
8. Story Estimating
9. Release Planning
10. Sprint Planning
11. Defining DONE
12. Sprinting Mechanics
13. Artifacts and Metrics
14. The Role of QA
15. Sprint Review
16. Sprint Retrospective
17. Distributed Team considerations
An effective Product Owner is one of the best predictors of product success, therefore, it is critical to understand the breadth of the role’s responsibilities in delivering a successful product. In this course we will teach you the tools and techniques to make you a highly effective agile leader through hands on workshops and lectures.
At the end of the 2-day course you will have gained sufficient knowledge and practice to:
• To conduct a collaborative user story writing session with your team
• To clearly articulate the acceptance criteria for each user story
• To break apart user stories that are too large to be completed in an iteration
• To effectively prioritize the backlog of user stories based on lean principles
• To identify the personas of your system and their needs
• Use backlog grooming techniques that will continuously improve the predictability and
effectiveness of your team
Audience
The people that will benefit the most from this course are:
• Product Managers and Product Owners responsible for the delivery of products.
• Business Analysts who are responsible for describing product features and their acceptance criteria
• Technical project managers who are responsible for partitioning features and scheduling deliverables.
• IT Managers responsible for a line of business systems.
• Scrum Masters can also benefit from this course as their role often includes coaching Product Owners.
Prerequisites
Attendees will be able to benefit the most from this class if they:
• Currently manage a product, or will be managing a product in the near future.
• Have a clear sense of the challenges and opportunities facing their product
• Desire to know more about how to leverage agility to deliver more value to their customers
Outline
Agile Leadership
Managing requirements
Project Chartering
Program Management
Pragmatic Personas
Story Mapping
Features and User Stories
Acceptance Tests
Definition of Done
Release Planning Workshop
Product Backlog Grooming
Distributed Teams
25-26 June 2013 – Agile Developers Training – 950 € (VAT exclusive).
16:45 – 17:30 Wrap-up dag 1
09:00 – 9:30 a new day, a new world
I found this course very interesting and I found the methodology much simpler and easier than other traditional methods.’
- Anonymous customer
Founder of Equalminds !
I’m an experienced Product Owner and already in software development for more than 20 years. I did real Business/ICT projects but also customer/online marketing projects. I’m passionate about Agile project approaches and love to be of any help to bridge the gap between business and ICT
co-Founder of Equalminds !
I’m a passionate agile advocate converging business, marketing and consumer needs when collaborating with teams on challenging projects. I am a hands-on personality who always looks up the intersection of Business and Technology.
Recently a Data Scientist fan.
Infrastructure Agile enthousiast !
Trying to work on infrastructure projects in an Agile fashion, a lot of time I come across huge obstacles but it is always a challenge to solve this the agile way.
Our Agile Crew
The number of people is unlimited, we can create an Agile Team for you by means of our extensive network.
No mather what type of project (web, mobile, ERP, CRM, Bigdata, Infrastructure, …..), we can always be of any help to you.
If you are interested in a job, give us a call
The Equalminds team exceeded our expectations and provided an amazine agile crew to deliver our webproject!
- Satisfied Customer
If you are interested in a permanent position within our company or if you are a freelancer who is interested in working with us, give us a call
What can we offer?
Equalminds offers you a challenging job in an informal but dynamic environment with many opportunities to develop yourself. Our employment conditions which we offer may be described as competitive and our potential for growth will offer numerous challenges for you in the future.
Our office is located in Kontich (Antwerp, Belgium)
Interested in applying?
If you are interested in securing the position of one of underneath positions at Equalminds, we look forward to receive a short letter of application and your curriculum vitae via email: info@equalminds.be.
For more information about the vacancy and the recruitment process, please contact Luc Segers or Stefaan Vermael.
You can also send us your resume and accompanied letter to info@equalminds.be and we will contact you.
The Role
Equalminds has ambitious growth plans and is highly depending on different teams that work on projects at the customers premises. Each team needs a product owner that represents the different business stakeholders to the team who can make well founded decisions regarding priority and functionality of their area.
As a Product Owner you work together with our customers business to come to a Product Backlog that you prioritize, based on business value as well as input from development regarding complexity and impact. You are expected to convey your vision to the team and outline the work to be done in each sprint.
The Product Owner role is a demanding role given that you have to consider our customers business stakeholders interests as well as the team´s needs to get their questions answered to ensure they can keep going.
Responsibilities
• Act as primary interface to business stakeholders to gain in depth understanding of business vision and feature needs.
• Define and articulate the product vision to stakeholders as well as the development team(s)
• Develop and maintain detailed user stories in a prioritized product backlog which accurately reflects customer and business priorities.
• Create artifacts like use case diagrams, high level page flows, functional flow diagrams to ensure teams have an understanding of the big picture
• Function as a primary product champion with the development team to continuously ensure development activities are optimally aligned with customer needs
• Take the lead in explanation, estimation and planning meetings
• Actively participate in daily Scrums, sprint reviews, and team retrospectives.
• Inspect the progress on the product delivery at the end of every sprint to accept the delivered software.
Qualifications
• Bachelor or Masters Degree or at least some years relevant work experience as Product Owner (or Project manager position).
• Results-oriented, customer oriented, flexible, collaborative, problem solving skills, “Do it” mentality
• Proficient in Dutch and English (writing and spoken), French is a plus
• Effective verbal and written communication skills to interact with individuals at all levels in the organization
• A ‘Getting Things Done’ mentality and preferably also Project Management experience (agile or any other)
• Sense of humor and excellent communication skills; you can persuade and motivate people
For this role you’re a capable negotiator. Experience in working in an agile/Scrum environment is preferred but not mandatory. Furthermore you’re able to manage priority and scope for technical development efforts
Why work at Equalminds?
• Your contribution is visible and will significantly contribute to our results;
• You work in an Agile environment with small scrum teams that include testers, developers and analysts;
• There are plenty of possibilities to develop yourself;
• Our working environment supports initiative and values your ideas;
• You will work on all kind of technology like web, mobile, crm, erp, …., depending on the project;
1 Agile Business Analyst Wanted (URGENT)!
An Agile / SCRUM Master / Product Owner Business Analyst is required for this exciting role working for leading organisation. You will be working closely with Product Owner and Stakeholders in order to collect, organise and understanding the business requirements.
The Agile / SCRUM Master / Product Owner Business Analyst will be identifying, analysing and documenting business processes and workflows to identify the improvements that can be made. You will be required to communicate technical issues to the client in a way that makes the business impact clearer.
To be successful for this role you will be a confident Business Analyst with skills including:
- Agile
- Requirement Gathering
- Excellent Communication
- Working Closely with Development Team
- Product Owner
- Mulitple Projects
You will also be an excellent communicatior and be able to work with colleagues in various departments and on customer projects. This is an excellent opportunity to work for an employer that offers on-going opportunities.
Due to our growth we are looking for several Scrum Masters to work in Software teams at in-house or on location to help deliver revolutionary technology projects
Seeking ScrumMasters / Agile Project Managers to manage the delivery of multiple projects through their expertise in Scrum, Product Ownership and Agile methodology. This represents an excellent opportunity for a Scrum Master seeking a new challenge in a truly Agile company (we all breed agile). An excellent benefits package with an above average pension scheme is in addition to a flexible, negotiable salary.
Responsibilities:
1. Act as ScrumMaster for 1 or 2 scrum teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.
2. Facilitate sprint planning, retrospectives and sprint demos
3. Assist the product owner with keeping the backlog groomed
4. Ensure cross-team coordination if necessary
5. Reach out to the larger company network for impediment removal
6. Maintain relevant metrics that help the team see how they are doing
7. Coach and mentor other scrum masters in our team. Ensure that our ways of working are consistent across the teams.
Qualifications:
Knowledge and Qualifications: (Not essential but good to have)
1. Knowledge of the software development life cycle
2. Certified Scrum Master / Certified Product Owner / Certified Scrum Practitioner / Professional Scrum Master I / Professional Scrum Master II
3. Knowledge and/or experience of other agile techniques (e.g. Kanban, DSDM, XP)
4. Many years experience working in an agile environment, preferably in a variety of situations
5. Proficient in Dutch and English (writing and spoken), French is a plus
Technical Skills (Not essential but good to have):
1. Understand basic fundamentals of iterative development
2. Understand other processes and methodologies and can speak intelligently about them and leverage other techniques to provide value to a team/enterprise
3. Understand basic fundamentals of software development processes and procedures
4. Understand the value of commitments to delivery made by a development team
5. Understand incremental delivery and the value of metrics
6. Understand backlog tracking, burndown metrics, velocity, and task definition
7. Familiarity with common Agile practices, service-oriented environments, and better development practices
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Ever want a good video on user stories – Here is one
Be Agile – Scale Up – Stay Happy
How can you change your organization to a more productive, creative, and engaging environment for everybody involved and continue to improve your product at great speed while growing exponentially. It is not something you can capture in one single ideology, but there are ways!
- See more at: http://www.dare2013.be/#sthash.8htK19R4.dpuf
Visit us at the Equalminds booth !!
Why not?
After all it is Business that creates value for its customers and Software is there to facilitate this.
Business is in the lead when running an Agile project.
The order of the deliverables in the Product backlog represent the business value
A product owner is challeged to prioritise the deliverables in such a way the team delivers optimal business value.
Often this means shifting risky but high profit factors upfront.
But also be able to draw a line when sufficient business value has been delivered (running lean).
A product owner is available for the team to be the proxy customer to answer many questions.
This means reconsidering certain stories when the cost is to high.
In practice you want an open communication between the agile team and the product owner.
I found a very good article about ‘How to be an excellent Product Owner’ at the site ‘Scrum by the generals”. Check it out
Send a Message
We are located near Antwerp in Belgium, feel free to drop by or give us a call if you want to contact us.
| p | Veldkant 33A – 2550 Kontich (Antwerp) – Belgium |
O |
Stefaan Vermael : +32 486 80 13 21 Luc Segers : +32 473 51 01 67 |
@ |
info@equalminds.be |
