Joke Vandemaele

After studying Visual Arts and pursuing an MBA in Marketing Management, I joined the .com movement as a usability expert. From there I moved to a traditional business analyst role where I was busy writing thick requirements documents when I discovered Agile Software Development in 2007.

I was the lead business analyst of a large software development team using Scrum. As product owner I helped stakeholders define, prioritize and refine business requirements within the product backlog. Now I coach other business analysts (in Agile Analysis) on how to become Product Owner and I teach them how to facilitate requirement capturing workshops, which is my specialization.

These analysis workshops, "Power Workshops", are based on the lean principles of teamwork, cooperative exploration and discovery of knowledge, and visual representation of information. They are the most effective way to kick start an ICT project and offer the minimum amount of analysis up front necessary to reach a common understanding of project goals, scope, cost and duration between Business and ICT.

The aspect of visualizing conversation and decision taking during the Power Workshop is considered an important contribution to the agile community. It has proven to be a huge and repeatable success which has led me to be invited to several international conferences as speaker:
•    Mini XP days (Belgium) - May 11, 2009
•    XP 2009 (Sardinia) - May 25 to 30, 2009
•    Agiles 2009 (Brazil) - October 6 to 9, 2009

I am a Certified Scrum Practitioner.