Tiago Garcez

I am an independent consultant focused on implementing Agile practices in organizations. With a background in Business Administration and Change Management, I have over 8 years of experience in Project Management and Business Analysis.  I became actively involved with Agile in 2008 and saw it as a way out of the "illusion of control" - one of the major causes for frustration in the various implementation projects I had worked on up to that point (thick requirements documents and massive MS Project files).
 

I am currently working as a Product Owner / Application Lead for a team of 16 software engineers within the Belgian Post. A challenging assignment since the organization is not really supportive of Agile approaches, we have nonetheless been able to achieve some significant results.  This was the topic of an experience report I gave at Agiles 2009 in Florianópolis, Brazil (Oct 6 - 9) titled "Working Agile in a Waterfall Organization"
 

With a social-anarchic philosophical leaning, I always believe the best results for any situation are achieved when people ignore hierarchies and come together in cross-functional teams to resolve specific challenges.  In IT projects, this means shortening the distance between the client and the engineers and understanding that priorities, risks and issues can never be fully defined upfront.  They must be constantly managed through dialogue and transparency.
 

tiago.garcez@agilar.org
Certified Scrum Product Owner