Alexander Thies

From mid-July to the end of 2024, I worked at CMBlu (chemical industry), which is working onthe development of an organic SolidFlow battery. My focus as an agile coach was on setting up an agile product development organization. Together with other coaches, I was responsible for initiating an agile framework, training the workforce, implementing the necessary tools together with IT, developing teams and training the relevant routines. In this way, we were able to gradually establish an agile mindset from team to management level and convert product development to agile working methods.

• Initial consulting on agile frameworks, in particular Scrum and SAFe

• Conducting workshops for the entire workforce

• Coaching agile product management at team and ART program level

• on agile process models, with a focus on Scrum

• Introduction of Jira as a process management tool

• Development of extensive setups for:

• Team backlogs and product backlogs at ART/progam level

• Various workflows, conventions and issue types

• Dependency and risk management

• Introduction of Confluence as a knowledge management tool

• Setup of a comprehensive documentation structure

• Coordination and modification of the structure according to

company-specific requirements

• Integration of knowledge and process management (Jira/Confluence)

• Coaching of Jira and Confluence at team and ART/program level

• Comprehensive coaching in agile requirements management

• Coaching of the Scrum framework in various teams

• Agile Team Lead as Scrum Master for several teams

From November 2020, I was involved in the „OneShop“ project in the CARIAD X5 Train at Diconium/VW CARIAD. There I am involved in changing roles (Product Owner & Scrum Master) in the development of a cross-brand and cross-country e-commerce platform, which will enable the VW Group to sell all vehicles and services online worldwide in the future.

• Coaching of the SAFe framework in various teams

• Coaching of the Scrum framework at team level

• Establishing routines at team and program level

• Coaching agile backlog management

• Comprehensive coaching in agile requirements management• Coordination with Solution Train Engineer (STE) and Release Train Engineer (RTE)

• Coaching agile mindset for all framework roles

• Team Health

• Reporting using JIRA and Confluence

• Backlog management

• Objective tracking

• Requirements prioritization

• Stakeholder management

• Coordination with: Program and solution level, product management, other POs in own train and across the board, 3rd party providers, system and solution

architects

• Risk Management

• Organization of deployments and release

• Bug tacking and fixing

Thanks to the ongoing expansion of the project and the steady growth of the team, I was able to establish myself in various project roles and gradually hand them over to internal employees. This resulted in my various activities within the project.

• customer consulting & strategy

• Initialization of the app project

• Goal definition, environment analysis, stakeholder management, risk assessment

• Selection and establishment of the process model

• Requirements management/requirement engineering, acceptance and

development of technical concepts

• Development and coordination of in-app projects

• Development of sustainable processes in the collaboration between

the app team and the specialist department based on JIRA and Confluence

• Transfer of the app project to the line organization

• Induction and ongoing coaching of new employees

• Coaching agile processes and tools

• Managing external service providers for technical design and IT services

• Overall responsibility for the management and further development of the app

• Prioritization and management of the product backlog and stakeholder

management

• Connection of the new central data warehouse

• microservice development for data transfer between the Dataware House and

the app backend

• Development of an administrator interface for data monitoring

• Requirement engineering for the ongoing development of the collaboration

between the app and the central dataware house

• Compliance with WCAG guidelines based on the EAA (European Accessibility

Acts), focus on mobile interfaces

• Coordination of all test projects (UATs, pentests, special functionality tests)

for the app and in-app projects with an international test provider team