Agile Tour spending 2 years in University of NCKU

 Two years ago, I started my new job as Senior Technical Manager in PAIA corp. which is located in Tainan city in the south of Taiwan. It is completely unexpected jounery I never experienced in previous business companies since I have to cooperate with more than ten students under the age of 20 in universities and mentor them one-on-one to develop their hard and soft skills in our projects.

This journey over the past two years has already been presented at several technical conferences and students' communities. It is a long story and was made in certain situations. At beginning of the project planning of our PROS system designed and constructed from Prof. Su Wen-Yu teaching in the field of computer science development at NCKU, he already decided to call out his graduated and undergraduated students to join this project. It is tough mission to leverage when I knew what kind of resources we can manage in this project. It means that we only have less than 10 unmatured students able to contribute efforts in PROS system.

Firstly, most students studying in computer science are not familiar with frontend development in term of user interfaces while they are spending much time on subjects of Algorithm, Data Structure, Operation System and Compiler. Therefore, I have to train one or two of them to specialize their skills on frontend development. In such a case, we should build a formal process to practice frontend talent development during the implementation of each sprint in our project. After over two to three sprints, we found three talented students including Baie, Aaron, and Jason continuing the improvement of the frontend skill.

Not only the growth of students' hard skill, but we should connect their force into one target. That is we should investigate the differentiation of everyone's purpose and try to satisfy their expectations. It is better initiated from a game.

I asked three students, Baie, Jesse, and Shao-Ting to participate in Taiwanese iThome Ironman Competition. In that game, we got to know each other in terms of not only skill proficiency but also personalities. Moreover, we encourage students to organize a study club and share their any findings weekly.

Throught the meeting, I brought some worldwide couch surfers to share interests and perception of their trips with students.

Additionally, I inspired the student, Jesse, to take on the role of hosting Tainan.py. Initially, she restarted it within our company, PAIA, and subsequently at the Good-Idea Studio company in Tainan as well.

Due to my studies at NTUA, the art university in Taiwan, over the past year, I documented the entire story of our collaboration with the student, Jesse, in a film production, Jesse's Machine Learning. It brings significant encouragement and a sense of identity into their working environment.

In the latter half of the second year, I invited the general convener of Agile Community Taiwan, Hermes Chang to our company. Afterwards, Hermes requested me to co-host additional agile events at PAIA company with Roy, the other co-host from Kdan Mobile in Tainan, specifically for junior employees and university students.

Following that, Hermes recommended me to participate in the volunteering for the RSG, Regional Scrum Gathering Taipei 2023 event. This allowed me to lead a large-scale gathering with numerous students and junior volunteers. It also provided a new perspective for students at NCKU.

When students finished their tasks for each part of our system, I encourged them to submit speaker proposals for several technical conferences in Taiwan.

Overall, we successfully completed various components of our PROS system and enhanced the original PAIA system.

It is a fantasy journey.

If you don't believe that things can be changed with a few attempts and daily actions, neither will the people you collaborate with.

Finally, I discovered that students are not the primary obstacles in the development of our project. On the contrary, the only limitation is set by the mental boxes we place in.

Leadership is a lifestyle. Agility is a lifestyle, too.