Lucky for the host country, Romnania, the ALE 2013 in Bucharest had a great impact on the participants.

The event itself is organized in an agile manner, with proactive volunteers from all over Europe. “Voice and video calls, online document sharing make this easy nowadays. The teams are sharing comfortable “sofas” – a “sofa” within ALE organization is a metaphor for a topic being worked on (such as program, marketing, finance, fun etc.). Sofas share their news on a regular basis and meet to keep an overview, typically represented by sofa members, quite similar to Scrum of Scrums meetings” – describes the organizing team on their official website.

The keynotes were delivered by three great speakers: Jurgen Appelone (one of the most influential people in today’s world of Agile, co-founder of ALE network , Stoos Network and Happy Melly business network), Joe Justice (the amazing founder of WIKISPEED, creating a road-legal car prototype based on Scrum method from software development), Liz Keogh (an independent Lean and Agile consultant, well-known blogger and international speaker).

The topics covered ideas about new types of organizations and organizational cultures, adaptive technical methods and solution implementation aspects or Agility outside IT.

“The Lightning talks and the Open Space interactive dialogues were full of meaning and authenticity” highlights Mr. Lóránd Tompa, Project Manager at Codespring. “The IT community prefers the agile methodology for being able handle complex and unknown elements through human interactions and adaptability. Seeing and understanding how the agile mentality can be expanded to the product management and organization management practices is alluring. The Agile thinking and methodology is one of our core ways of delivering value to our global customers.”-  Lóránd continues.

Among other different talks like “The SCRUM and the willpower: how neuroscience can boost your productivity”, “From Agile Software Development to building an agile company”, “Using Design thinking to hack the culture in organizations”, “Using Lean Startup for Agile Product Management” or “Incremental Design, Simply Explained” one talk has drawn attention on the importance of the human factor: “The Epidemiology of Motivation” (delivered by Andrei Postolache and Marius Leatu). It outlines the importance of allowing intrinsic motivation flourishing and contaminating working teams.  A process that appears to be possible in self-organizing environments, flat structures and networked organizations.

“In the end we all learn and relearn the fact that Agile mentality promotes the values delivered to the customer above control. Sometimes it is hard to pass on the one-person responsibility for a self-organizing team, but in the end it becomes a matter of trust and continuous achievement of given goals” concludes Mr. Lóránd Tompa, Project Manager at Codespring.

As a final word, Codespring officially thanks the ALE2013 team and volunteers for delivering such an inspiring event and we are looking forward for future similar happenings. As an agile team, we are committed to always find best solutions for our customers and their software development projects.

Codespring is devoted to the Agile/Scrum methodology and the un-conference triggers our team for constant process improvement.

Agile, Lean and much beyond!