Dries Bellen

At Baloise Dries took on the role of Scrum Master in a very early stage of a transformation towards the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In this role Dries not only took care of facilitating the Scrum Events (formerly known as ceremonies) for his team which was partially in Belgium and partially spread over the UK, Portugal and India, but Dries also leveraged his years of Agile experience to coach and challenge the leadership of the Agile Release Train (ART) to which his team belonged. The technical context of the team was .NET on MS BizzTalk.

Next to that, Dries is also supporting the Agile Coaches in the LACE by being involved in setting up support structures and maintaining challenging dependencies through data extraction from Team Foundation Server.

Verbomatique is Dries’ passion project. Verbomatique is a mobile app that helps pupils automate the conjugation of French verbs. In this endeavour Dries applies all the techniques he coaches his clients on, ranging from Agile (slicing, story mapping, impact mapping,...) to Lean, Lean UX, CI/CD, MVP, and so on.

To get the work done, Dries plays the role of Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, Tester, Marketeer, Agile Solution Architect, Field Researcher and so on.

Dries guided Telenet on their journey towards an agile organisation at scale. Telenet have decided to implement an agile way of working at scale which is largely inspired by both the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and the so- called Spotify model. Dries moved throughout the complex organisation in various roles, helping Squads, Centres of Excellence, Communities of Practice and Chapters.

As a Transformation Coach, Dries actively contributed to a data-driven approach of transforming the organisation towards more flow and effectiveness. Besides that Dries united the people with the necessary know-how to address the weakest links in the organisation. In order to do that, Dries combined both his business acumen and his knowledge of modern IT infrastructure and Software Development practices such as CI/CD and DevOps. On top of that Dries delivered a Proof Of Concept that allowed the customer to visualise their internal dependencies using data extracted from JIRA through the use of Neo4j (graphQL) and vis.js.

As an Agile Coach, Dries coaches several roles ranging from Development Team members, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Tribe Leads to so-called Area Leads (Senior Management) to within a so-called Area at Telenet. Next to that, Dries is actively involved in transformation efforts at several levels through the creation of transparency and empowerment. In this role Dries combines his business acumen with his knowledge of Lean/Agile to help the clients grasp the bigger picture of their journey to agile.

As an Agile Trainer, Dries has contributed to the delivery of a two-day training on the Lean/Agile at scale framework that has been tailored for Telenet. This framework is based on several industry best practices in the field of scaling agile. This contribution exists in creating interactive exercises as well as (co-)facilitating the training in large groups.

As a Scrum Master Coach Dries coached several aspiring Scrum Masters and helped them achieve the next level in their craft. The Scrum Masters were very satisfied with the constructive and helpful feedback that Dries provided using his Team Coaching skills.