Andreea Pârvu

As we are getting ready for the next edition, we thought of introducing the team and of giving you some more reasons to attend the 4th edition of MobOS. MobOS stands for the Mobile Operating Systems Community and the associated annual event, aimed at sharing technical knowledge, at bringing an international perspective and at giving you the chance to network with minds alike. In less than 4 years, MobOS grew steadily, becoming, at the moment, the biggest conference on mobile technologies in Romania. Started in 2013, it now has a team of 4 individuals connected by the passion for technology and mobile. Let us get to know them and see what it’s in it for you - the passionate mobile developer curious for more and looking forward to meeting people like yourself.

The Mobile Operating Systems Community Romania is intended to build a community around the field of mobile software development. The community will be mainly build through virtual communications, but also with key points of interaction in form of dedicated events.

IT Cluj market has evolved tremendously in the last five years. Latest studies showed that at the moment there is a shortage of senior IT professionals to meet the projects’ needs. According to statistics realized last summer, there were 11 000 opportunities and only 9000 IT professionals on the market at that time. It is the perfect chance for the HR functions to emerge from support functions and begin to play a key role in business strategy.

I think there is no person or company in the IT area who hasn’t heard at least once about Agile-Scrum. For those who are not yet familiarized with this concept, in short, Agile Scrum can be defined as a methodology of management for IT projects development, which ensures the delivery on time and the meeting of deadlines set by the client, optimizing both team work and the obtained results.

f the first part of the article was focused on defining the 7 steps that need to be followed when a team-building is organized, the second part will be oriented on creating a clear understanding of the importance and benefits of a team building program, but also the types of team building activities. As you are already used to, in this number there will also be practical exercises that can be used in creating a team. From my previous experience, most of the team-buildings are organized when the conflict has already arisen.

Many companies are organizing in this period team building activities and managers are talking about what kind of activities are suitable to be used during these events. My purpose in this article is on a more practical approach. I don’t want to insist on defining the concept of team building because people are already used with it, but I would like to mention 7 steps related to how to organize team building activities.

The second part of the article „Performance Management” will focus on the tools used in this process. In the same time it will present some practical model that could be easily implemented in every company. In the following part of the article, I will describe a model of defining objectives in the 3 phases of the performance management process:
(1) Define competencies that are necessary for living the company’s values.
(2) Define team objectives: make a short description of them, establish a clear method of measuring them by setting Key Performance Indicators and set the results expected.
(3) Define individual objectives that are allingned with the ones set together with the team.

Unlike the other articles published in the previous issues, this one will have several parts. The first part offers a definition of performance management and process and the tools used for its implementation. In a dynamic environment in which companies put more and more emphasis on employee development, every organization around the globe tried defining those elements that contribute to the creation of a successful organizational environment.

The workshop from the last edition of launching Today software Magazine, determined me to approach one more topic on leadership and management, because of all the questions raised during the panels about being a leader, overcoming the situational leadership theory, which are the limits of managing a team and once again, the difference between being a manager and a leader. Because of that, this article I am going to make a short presentation of the roles and responsibilities of a leader and a manager. As mentioned already in the previous article, the leader is the person who has a vision and has followers, and the manager is the person oriented on the strategic part.

This article is the first one when I am writing about Leadership. I have to confess that at the very beginning I was not very comfortable in addressing this topic, because everybody has an opinion on what means to be a Leader and what kind of Leadership style should be better used. Any affirmation on this topic may be very easy contradicted because there are so many Leadership Theories developed and people can find a lot of counter-arguments.

For sure everybody heard about „Social Networks” because lots of articles were written on this topic, about the history of Social Networks, advantages and disadvantages or confidentiality of the information. But, the purpose of this article is to identify the impact that this kind of site could have in the recruitment process. There are a lor of Social Networks, but I will present in the following pages only 2 of them: Facebook and LinkedIn.

People are always talking about trends. Before starting to write this article, I did not have the curiosity to understand the deep meaning of the word. And as the best source is always the Dex , I started reading the simple and trivial explanations presented there. A trend represents a natural predisposition for something, a tendency, an attraction, a conscious action toward a defined purpose. Another definition describes the trend as an evolution of someone in a certain sense. Starting from this formulation I thought about what would be the connection between the trend and my work field

When I accepted the invitation to write about “How to prepare for a job interview”, I thought it would be simple. I intend this article to be easy to read and understand, and last but not least, to be an opportunity to learn something useful. When I started to write it, I realized Romanian is not an easy language and it’s even more difficult to express complex ideas in a simple way. After having finished it, I asked a 10-year old child to read it, in order to test its simplicity and fluency. He told me he didn’t understand a thing. So I started all over again.