Dimitris Livas and Alexandros Basakidis, Partners and Co-founders of Agile Actors, discuss their new venture
Dimitris Livas
Please provide a little background on Agile Actors.
Agile Actors is a network of tech professionals that form effective and efficient software development teams, knowledgeable in cutting-edge as well as in traditional technologies, methodologies and processes. These teams are hired and in some cases acquired by organizations in need of staffing their software development projects. These projects may be long or short term and may require a variety of specialties and seniority.
Agile Actors strives to become an environment where a tech professional will be offered the opportunities and choices to practice and achieve his/her next career goal. As a member of a global team, an Agile Actor professional aims to be a professional of the world and resident of the place of his/her choice.
What is your special expertise?
Agile Actors professionals are practicing agile methodologies on the most important project: their own professional development. They gradually evolve their own seniority by continuously aiming and achieving short term motivating goals.
How do you see the company expanding?
We grow by expanding both our network of global customers and our network of tech professionals where the first gives the second the environment to live and evolve. Currently we have customers in the UK, the US, Sweden and Greece. Currently most of our tech professionals are located in Athens, where the Agile Actors incubation started and we aim to expand to other global locations.
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Alexandros Basakidis
What is the vision behind Agile Actors?
Agile Actors aims to be an “agile” organization. We respect our people and empower them to decide and self-organize. We value their feedback and use it to continuously improve. We are advocates of agile management practices and we strive to create such a culture and mentality.
How do you view the scaling up process?
Our philosophy is based on “lean management.” We have grown significantly over the course of the last year, from 25 to 175 people. During this journey we have managed to maintain a very lean structure, having only six people to manage and administrate the organization, with the rest being tech professionals.
What new models of business services do you plan to introduce to fulfil your vision?
Agile Actors develops, coaches and manages cross functional teams for our customers according to their specific needs. Our partnerships, mainly long-lived, are based on us adapting to the processes and standards, ceremonies and guidelines of our partners, so we create united teams that improve collaboration.
Our services are in the areas of:
- Software development
- UX/UI Design
- Business Analysis
- Product and Service Design
- Quality Assurance and Test automation
- Agile Coaching
We provide services on cutting edge technologies, including Javascript, Scala, Java, .Net, Nodejs, Angular, React, React-Native and Mobile, and traditional technologies, such as Cobol.