Could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Burak Uluocak. I have been working in IT and banking sectors for 17 years. I took part in large scale projects as Business Analyst, System Analyst, Project Leader, Scrum Master, Project/Program and Portfolio Manager. For the last 2 years, I have been working in Turkiye Finans Participation Bank (with 400 IT and 4500 total employees) as the Head of Project Management Office with 17 project, program and portfolio managers. After our agile transformation the name of our division was changed as “Agile Project Management Office”. Also, for the last couple of months, “System Architecture”, “Business Process Management Center of Excellence” and newly officially formed “Agile Studio” divisions have been reporting to me.
As concentrated on management theories and practices, I have engineering and MBA degrees and I am PhD in Strategic Management field. I have Project Management Professional (since 2006), Certified Scrum Master (since 2009), Professional Scrum Master (since 2014) and professional coach (since 2012) certifications. Beside many national presentations, my first international presentation was in 2013 at PMI Global Congress: “The Degree of Relationship Between Critical Success Factors and Project Performance in Information Technology Sector”. Related to great interest, I presented the first experiences of our agile transformation programme at Agile Summit Turkey in October 2014 and at Agile Summit Middle East in Dubai, in April 2015.
I live in İstanbul, I am married and have a 4 years old daughter. I like sports, especially tennis and wing chun, latin dances and reading. Currently, I work on my book about project success.
You have become the largest scrum organization between East Europe and Middle East, with 50 teams and 300 developers in one year. What’s the secret to a successful agile transformation?
What was your biggest challenge?
Sponsor support – here Bank CEO - was a big challenge. So we organized a training to all C-Levels. After the training they started to give their support and after successful results had come their support increased. Also, lots of IT employees had doubts and our organization was very hierarchical. Again, we trained everybody, gave consultancy and officially changed the organization leaving no doubts.
What philosophy drives your agile transformation?
It is classic, but true: Kaizen. Agile transformation initiated by 5 people and I was the only one who knew and practiced scrum before. Today, about 400 people know and use scrum framework in our organization. I am still the product owner of Agile Studio, but I know that now many people know and practice scrum better than me and as a result all together we are getting better each day.
What are the next steps in your journey?
Agile transformation is an endless journey. Currently we are working on Nexus, a new framework to coordinate many scrum teams working on the same project or topic. We are expanding Kanban especially in operational teams. We are transforming all backlogs to TFS Agile in order to be able to coordinate and monitor scrum teams using the system. We also work on team performance appraisal system instead of classic individual performance evaluation.
© Copyright 2024 International Data Group Poland S.A.
00-131 Warszawa, ul. Grzybowska 2/44
tel. +48 22 3217800