Philip Abernathy - Founder and Alchemist, Purple Candor
In his previous role as Agile Professional Development Lead for Suncorp, Philip Abernathy helped set up the 'Agile Academy', thus leading the spread of Agile across the industry as a whole. He now coaches, trains and consults at board room and senior management level to help companies transform to an Agile way of working. In his own words, "having grown grey on the Waterfall method" in large corporate organisations in the financial services, energy and telecom sectors, Philip understands the structure and discipline needed by large organisations. Marrying this need with Agile's dynamism is the alchemy he brings to the table. Philip has 31 years of hands-on, information technology experience and over 18 years of consulting and management experience with blue chip companies in the IT international arena. He has been practising and preaching Agile for the last 11 years. He was Chief Information Officer of Shell Markets Middle East and later founded his own IT services delivery company in The Netherlands. Philip has extensive experience in the difficult areas of Distributed Agile and Agile/Lean Governance and Agile Leadership.
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Doug Blue - Product Director, SEEK
Doug Blue is an online media professional with over 11 years experience leading product management and development teams for some of Australia's largest online brands including SEEK, realestate.com.au, Trading Post and Yellow Pages.
Currently he is the Product Director at SEEK, where he leads the Product Management, User Experience and Web Analytics teams. Doug has also worked in the IT sector at Unisys, and worked for the United States Navy as a submarine officer and nuclear engineer.
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Julian Boot - SVP Products and Operations, Majitek
Julian Boot has over 20 years building and managing software products. A reformed developer, he's worked at online travel sites, big finance companies, large city councils, consultancies and start-ups. Recently, Julian has been developing a design-focused product culture in a 10 year old start-up. Prior to that, Julian spent six years as an Agile consultant with ThoughtWorks, an international enterprise software delivery specialist and was Product Manger at ThoughtWorks Studios while building an Agile collaboration and project management tool.
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Evan Bottcher - Continuous Delivery Practice Lead, ThoughtWorks
Evan Bottcher has been a software developer for more than 15 years, engaged in the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise applications and websites. His experience crosses multiple industries including financial services, insurance, publishing, digital media, telecommunications, and education. In recent years, Evan has become increasingly obsessed with solving the problems that lie in the 'last mile' of solution delivery - continuous integration, automated testing and deployment, and production feedback loops.
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James Brett - Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
James Brett is a Principal Consultant for ThoughtWorks. James works across the Asia Pacific region with small to large (100,000 employees) organisations undertaking Agile Transformations, providing strategic direction, tactical solutions, coaching and training to leadership teams and executives. With a solid technical background of over 15 years and one of the first Certified Scrum Coaches, James has worked with a number of blue-chip clients in the UK, Australia, US and China, in a range of market verticals. His passion and focus is to help the Agile world address Agile leadership and transformation in a more concrete, enjoyable and productive way. James is currently working alongside Jim Highsmith on a number of initiatives including his Adaptive Leadership concept.
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Simon Bristow - Senior Project Manager, SEEK
Simon Bristow has hosted, chaired and spoken at numerous Agile related user groups and conferences across Australia.
He was accountable for the Agile transition at Aconex, and now at SEEK as Senior Project Manager, Simon has played a key role in the company's enterprise Agile transformation. Prior to Aconex, he was Head of E-commerce at Goldman Sachs JBWere.
Simon has 15 years experience in conceptualising, designing, managing and delivering online technology projects.
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Michael Bromley - Head of Customer Experience, Portals and Online Services, Integration and B2B, NBN Co
Michael Bromley has been working in the online and mobile technology industry for more than 15 years, covering business development, product development and consulting. He joined NBN Co in 2010 as Head of Portals and Online Services. Prior to this Michael spent four years at Telstra in a similar role and 10 years in financial services as an investment banker with Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns in the US. In his current role Michael has been tasked with managing the overall online strategy and development program of work, aligning delivery with commercial requirements and the technical strategy roadmap. He manages a broad team of business analysts, project managers, developers, testers and user experience specialists.
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Steven Caddy - Senior Producer, REA Group
Steven Caddy began working with Agile during Lonely Planet's early adventures with the methodology nearly 10 years ago, coming to see it as an ideal environment for designers by exposing them to developers and business people in ways that mandate demonstrated competency, communication, earned trust and confronted failure. An experienced design leader, first at Lonely Planet and now REA Group, Steve was trying to close the perceptual gap between creative direction and the field that would call itself experience design when REA Group offered him the ultimate holistic design job: playing the role of 'the business' for REA Group's flagship consumer channel.
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David Carpenter - Senior Technical Project Delivery Manager, IAG
David Carpenter is Head of Delivery for IAG Direct Insurance, managing all discretionary projects totalling $40m per annum and 120 resources in total.
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Marina Chiovetti - Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
After nearly five years of leading large-scale Agile change programs at big corporations in Australia, Marina Chiovetti has recently shifted gears and moved to China to lead the expansion of ThoughtWorks' consulting practice in the local China markets. Marina is now helping traditional Chinese corporations make the shift from top-down hierarchical structures to collaborative, continuously learning workplaces. She is now learning first-hand just how important leadership culture is to the success of Agile adoption.
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Ed Cortis - Director of IT, Lonely Planet
Ed Cortis, Director of Information Technology at Lonely Planet, was responsible for overseeing the successful management of all the changes undertaken by the company over the last four years. Ed has successfully integrated Agile software development with world-class ITIL compliant IT operations. This has halved the operating cost of IT within Lonely Planet while continuing to ensure the business has the tools it needs. He saw his focus as helping define a business strategy that diagnosed core problems, looked at opportunities, and identified the constraints. From there, he saw his task was to implement solutions through an Agile execution focus.
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Sandra Dalli - Agile Transformation Lead, BankWest
Sandra Dalli has been actively involved in BankWest's Agile transformation program and has a leading role in the launch and movement of Agile values into the organisation, BAU teams, and at an individual level offering strategies, coaching, education and support in adopting Agile practices and principles.
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Nigel Dalton | Chief Information Officer, REA Group
A veteran Agile evangelist, with over 10 years experience applying Agile principles to IT and product development in the USA, Australia and NZ, Nigel Dalton is the co-founder of Luna Tractor, a business consultancy company taking Agile and lean thinking beyond software development to all areas of business and organisations. Luna Tractor leverages the experience gained in the transformation of Lonely Planet between 2007 and 2011, with over 20 teams running variants of Agile, kanban and lean methods to support their aim to make amazing guides in all formats for customers.
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Keith Dodds - Director, Client Relations, ThoughtWorks
Keith Dodds is Director of Client Relations for ThoughtWorks AsiaPac. He has more than 30 years experience in sales and general management. He believes in informed conversations with clients about the intended and unintended consequences of their behaviour.
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Richard Durnall - Head of Delivery, REA Group
Richard Durnall is the Head of Delivery for REA Group, based in Melbourne, Australia. The REA Group is entrenched in Australia as the operator of the country's most popularresidential and commercial real estate websites as well as operating leading sites in Italy, Luxembourg and Hong Kong. Richard is responsible for the delivery of REA's online sites and mobile applications and over the last two years has led the application of Agile processes to the REA delivery model. Richard has worked in the high-tech industry for over 15 years with experience in large blue-chip organisations, management consulting and online.
Richard is a frequent author on applying Lean management thinking to IT divisions at his site (www.richarddurnall.com) and presents frequently on the applications of Lean in IT.
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Simon Elisha - Principal Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services
As a Principal Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services, Simon Elisha helps businesses leverage technologies like cloud computing that are changing the way businesses compete in the new world of IT. With extensive experience in large-scale systems architecture and development as well as having held senior roles at major technology vendors and business consulting organisations, Simon brings a pragmatic and refreshing approach to the nexus of technology and business. Simon has over 21 years of industry experience and has held senior roles at organisations including Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems, VERITAS Software, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and EDS. Simon holds an Honors Degree in Information Technology from Monash University.
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Patrick Eltridge - Chief Information Officer, Telstra
Patrick Eltridge joined Telstra as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Executive Director IT in 2010. Patrick has responsibility for the end-to-end design and delivery of IT infrastructure and applications as well as Telstra's data centres and managed information services. Prior to Telstra, Patrick had been engaged in banking and IT for over 20 years with experience in financial services, technology start-ups, management consulting and related commercial activities including M&A, strategic sourcing, expense management, strategy and product development. Patrick's focus has been on embedding and aligning IT delivery more closely with business teams, fast growth, and rapid time to value.
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Megan Folsom - Technical Project Manager, eBay.com
Megan Folsom has worked with software and web application technology since 1993. She has led globally distributed projects and technical teams in London, Austin, New York City, Toronto, Calgary, Costa Rica, India, Russia, Tokyo, Beijing and Seattle. Her expertise with web start-up environments has helped bring Agile culture and values to a variety of chaotic and traditional product development environments. Her portfolio of products includes features and international site launches for several high profile companies and brands: Amazon.com, HomeAway.com, IBM, Thoughtworks and eBay. Megan has attained her Master's degree from the University of Westminster in London and has written an article for the Cutter Consortium and her documentary Ley De Tierras, shot on location in Venezuela, is available for viewing on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).
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Perryn Fowler - Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Perryn Fowler has been coaching teams in applying Agile software development techniques since the early 2000's. He started with an XP background, but quickly added techniques from Scrum and Lean to his arsenal.
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Jason Furnell - Experience Design Consultant, ThoughtWorks
With 15 years proven experience in the implementation of business strategy through design, Jason Furnell is an expert in bridging the gap between the business, marketing and technology teams. Leading an Agile design process that drives technology solutions towards rich and useful customer experiences, Jason prides himself on delivering application designs that effortlessly shoulder the weight of functional complexity in simple and engaging ways. Over the last five years Jason has embraced workshop-based design facilitation and multidisciplinary collaborative design methods - vital for setting up new projects for success in a fast-moving Agile environments, while ensuring shared understanding, buy-in and ownership of new initiatives across the entire product and delivery team.
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Marc Galbraith - Coach and Delivery Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Marc Galbraith works for ThoughtWorks and brings 15 years experience in software development, Agile practices and coaching. An organiser of Perth's local Agile meet-up group 'Agile-Perth', Marc is passionate about not only improving the IT landscape but understanding what it takes for businesses to move to business agility. Marc has led teams through difficult projects in local and geographically disbursed environments for both small and large organisations and now finds himself coaching teams in some of the largest Agile change programs in Australia.
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Tref Gare - Senior Interaction Designer, Aconex
Tref Gare has been working in IT for the last 11 years, initially as a developer and for the last six years as an interaction designer. He's been playing in the Agile UX sandpit for the last three years. As such he has worked in both Waterfall and Agile on both sides of the fence. Prior to his current life in IT, Tref had a previous life as a theatre performer, writer and director, with an emphasis on devised and improvised work. When he made his sharp right turn from theatre into IT, he didn't expect to find much use for those skills. He was wrong.
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Nichola Gill - Online Producer, REA Group
A producer with 12 years industry experience, Nichola Gill has a broad knowledge of online development working in start-up and corporate environments in Dublin and Melbourne. A degree in Industrial Design and a Masters in Computing and Design gave her a solid foundation in the process of product development with a propensity to think innovatively while focusing on user experience and environments. For the last four years she has been managing products within REA Group, site owner of realestate.com.au. During this time she has experienced the transition from waterfall to an Agile methodology, giving her insights into the challenges and opportunities Agile can create both inside and outside the IT department. Currently she manages the ongoing iterative development of online customer products.
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Stewart Gleadow - Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Stewart Gleadow is a Consultant with ThoughtWorks Australia, specialising in iOS development. He has been working closely with the mobile team at REA on their iPhone and iPad applications for searching Australian real estate. His particular interest is in the automated testing of mobile applications.
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Ilan Goldstein - Agile Solutions Manager, Reed Elsevier
Ilan Goldstein is an agilist currently based in Sydney. He has worked with start-ups, market leaders and public companies to improve their agility through the implementation of Scrum. Most recently he has been working with Reed Elsevier, the world's largest B2B media company on their Scrum adoption.
For the certification buffs out there, he is a Certified Scrum Professional, Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner. In addition, Ilan is a PMP and Prince2 Practitioner (so he knows how the other half lives).
Ilan is currently writing his first book that is based on his popular blog, 'Scrum Shortcuts Without Cutting Corners'. It is being published by Addison-Wesley as part of the popular 'Mike Cohn Signature Series'.
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Andrew Green - Product Designer, Cogent
Andrew Green is currently a Product Designer and strategist at Cogent. Over the last eight years, he has led the product design for a range of companies in the United States, UK, Australia and China. His clients have included Mercedes-Benz USA, American Museum of Natural History, SEEK, Ford USA and Melbourne Business School.
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Daniel Haughey - Delivery Centre Manager, realestate.com.au
Daniel Haughey has over 15 years commercial IT experience working in Europe and Australia for blue-chip corporations, consulting groups, product companies and dot coms in the delivery of large and complex software systems. In recent years his focus has been IT leadership and Agile transformation. He currently holds the role of Delivery Centre Manager at REA, where he is responsible for the establishment and operation of REA's China delivery centre.
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Matthew Hodgson - Partner, Senior Executive for UX and Agile, Zen Ex Machina
As one of the UX industry's thought leaders, Matthew Hodgson has a reputation for innovation and leading-edge strategic thinking through his unique multidisciplinary application of Scrum, information architecture and design thinking, as well as behavioural and cognitive psychology to enterprise projects. Over the last few years, Matthew has focussed on the use of Scrum to manage large scale government eHealth programs, deliver non-IT projects, and introduce Agile methods to the business as an effective means of continuous delivery of value to stakeholders, customers, clients and end-users. Matthew is best known as a strategist and international speaker who lives by the axiom "the only power in knowledge is to share it".
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Kai Hu - Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks China
Kai Hu is Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks in China with almost a decade of experience in the creation of large-scale enterprise applications and the integration of disparate systems. During his tenure at ThoughtWorks, he has also been involved in the design and development of Cruise and CruiseControl. Kai has published many articles about design, testing and Agile software development. He currently holds the role of General Manager for REA's delivery centre in China.
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David Joyce - Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
David Joyce is an Agile coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience. In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore teams and successfully launched an internet video start-up from inception to launch. More recently, before moving to Australia, David coached teams on Lean, Kanban and Systems Thinking at BBC Worldwide in the UK. David currently works for ThoughtWorks as a Principal Consultant and is a Systems Thinker, Lean practitioner, Kanban coach and certified Scrum Master. Last year he received the Lean SSC Brickell Key award for outstanding achievement and leadership.
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Martin Kearns - National Capability Lead, SMS MT
Martin Kearns is the National Capability Lead for Agile services at SMS MT. An experienced technology professional, Martin has over 18 years of industry experience. Martin is leading the development of an enterprise Agile capability within SMS to support the business strategies of a diverse set of clients. He is a pioneer in the field of Scrum, being one of the first three Scrum Coaches to be certified in the world. Martin's forte is in the coaching of individuals and organisations to improve their application of the Agile process and to build high performance teams. He has an infectious passion for Agile and is heavily involved with the community. He co-authored the CSC Whitepaper, is part of the coaching board for the Scrum Alliance, and is a CSC/CSP Examiner. Martin has a strong technical background moving over into a more consultant role after moving to Australia, where is love and passion for Agile practice began.
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Emma Kerley - Risk and Compliance Manager, EQ Response. Vero Insurance
Over the past 12 years, Emma Kerley has worked for a number of insurance companies in the UK and NZ in marketing and risk and compliance roles. She is also a Senior Associate of The Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance. Emma is currently the Risk and Compliance Manager for the Canterbury Earthquake Response programme at Vero Insurance where she has developed and implemented the risk and governance framework between Vero and their PMO, MWH Mainzeal.
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Craig Langenfeld - Principal Consultant, Rally Software
Craig Langenfeld is a Principal Consultant for Rally Software in Boulder, Colorado. His passion for continuous improvement began with his role on the Continuous Improvement Team at John Deere Manufacturing. He brought what he learned in manufacturing to software development as a software engineer, project manager (PMP), and ScrumMaster (CSM) applying various lean practices within corporate IT at State Farm Insurance and Monsanto. Craig has been a major contributor in the expansion of Agile practices into new markets such as the UK and Australia. Most recently he partnered with Dean Leffingwell to provide the Agile community with guidance for implementing Agile in highly regulated environments. Craig continues to offer a real world approach to continuous improvement for practitioners who live on real projects.
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Steve Lawrence - Lead Agile Coach, Rally Software Australia
Steve Lawrence is a leading Agile practitioner and coach with over seven years as an Agile practitioner, coach and trainer. Steve has consulted and coached large scale Agile transformations and also smaller scale project delivery teams. He has consulted to both corporate and government clients. He is now a lead Agile coach at Telstra. Steve has seen the best and the worst that Agile can offer and has become more of a pragmatist, focusing on what will work and what will add value.
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Kate Linton - Experience Design Consultant, ThoughtWorks
As a designer with over 20 years experience in visual communications, Kate Linton has successfully led creative teams in the delivery of campaigns and communications across a diverse array of media from above and below the line and, over the last 10 years, primarily online.
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Nish Mahanty - Software Delivery Manager, MYOB
Dr Nish Mahanty is a Software Delivery Manager at MYOB. He has over 15 years experience working in IT, having worked in several start-ups and consultancies before long stints at SEEK and nabCapital. Nish is passionate about building high performing teams in order to deliver great business outcomes. Having experienced several "death march" mega-projects, he was convinced that there had to be a better way of delivering software, based on valuing team members as individuals. Agile was a natural fit, and Nish has spent the last 10 years driving Agile transformations within companies. Nish has been fortunate to have worked with a range of experts from across the Agile, Lean, and Kanban communities, and loves the challenge of adapting what he has learned to each new business challenge.
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Eli Marks - Business Analyst, NBN Co
Eli Marks is a highly motivated professional business analyst with experience of working across multiple project teams to deliver complex IT solutions in various industries. As a strong advocate of Agile principles and processes, he's always on the lookout for ways to improve processes to create a better working environment and deliver the results that the business is striving for.
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Sarah McAllister - Agile Practice Lead, BankWest
Following her first taste of Agile over six years ago, Sarah McAllister has played a number of roles in Agile project delivery including Business Analyst, Scrum Master and Coach and currently manages the Agile Practice Coaching team at BankWest. Sarah joined BankWest at the start of their Agile transformation journey and has since played a leading role in shaping and driving the cultural and practical adoption of Agile at all levels within the organisation.
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Colin McCririck - Executive Manager, Suncorp
Colin McCririck has over 30 years of experience in a variety of different industries including banking and insurance, natural resources, utilities and government departments. Colin's roles have included strategy and architecture as well as software development. Colin currently leads a technology team of over a hundred staff that look after the insurance claims domain at Suncorp. This includes projects and support across multiple product lines for Suncorp's core insurance brands in personal and commercial insurance.
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Leon Messerschmidt - Tech Lead, Aconex
Leon Messerschmidt has a decade of Agile software development experience. He is a tech lead for the core Agile team at Aconex, having previously been involved in the Agile transformation of Lonely Planet and introducing Agile software development to the South African market as part of the Psybergate team of consultants.
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Shane Morris - Interaction Designer, Automatic Studio
Shane Morris is one of Australia's most respected user experience professionals. Through consulting, mentoring and training he has helped organisations create compelling digital experiences since 1991. In that time he has worked on desktop applications, internet applications, mobile user interfaces, physical devices and web sites. Shane has taught user experience topics around the world and is also a key contributor to "101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School" at ixd101.com. Shane has worked with companies like Microsoft, Lonely Planet, M&C Saatchi, Cochlear, Amnesia Razorfish and Sensis - helping creative and technical professionals collaborate to create services that empower, inspire and reward. His passion is transforming the complex and constrained into the simple and powerful, not just because it is a valuable endeavour, but because it is hard - and therefore immensely rewarding. Shane's previous experience includes being one of Microsoft's first User Experience Evangelists world-wide; Director of Echo Interaction Design for six years; and General Manager and Principal Consultant at The Hiser Group.
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Daniel Oertli - Founder, LIIIFT
Daniel Oertli is an international IT and Operations executive, with C-level and VP-level experience in global B2B and B2C companies. For the last two years, he has been leading a busy period of transformational change as Chief Information Officer of REA Group (operators of market-leading property sites across the world, including Australia's #1 realestate.com.au).
Daniel brings commercial acumen, break-through thinking, broad technology expertise and performance management skills to the boardroom table - and translates strategies into outcomes with a leadership style that inspires action.
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Dipesh Pala - Agile Capability Lead, Solnet Solutions
As an Agile Coach, Dipesh Pala pursues his passion for helping organisations of all sizes to incrementally adopt the benefits of Agile practices. He has a long history in software delivery having worked within a variety of industries as a programmer, business systems analyst, iteration manager and project manager. Over the last five years, Dipesh has helped many project teams as an on-the-ground Agile consultant and mentor. He has been instrumental in rolling out Agile methods in many organisations and is currently coaching and mentoring aspiring iteration managers, Agile project managers and team leaders to become the Agile practitioners their teams need. A keen advocate of simplicity, Dipesh offers simple, practical yet powerful ways to address the challenges team members and managers in Agile environments face today. He continuously pushes individuals and teams beyond the practices and principles to take a step further into the Agile journey.
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Sarah Pollard - Agile Delivery Partner, BankWest
Sarah Pollard has over 10 years of project management experience in banking software development projects including the delivery of recent BankWest Agile projects. Sarah's current role within the Agile practice is an Agile Delivery Partner focusing on Agile transformation within the project portfolio and IT areas.
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Robert Postill - Development Manager, C3 Business Solutions
Robert Postill's career has spanned 14 years, three continents and numerous roles. In the UK, US and Australia, Robert has driven outcomes in finance, media and commercial software. He's been a developer, systems administrator and architect as well as a technical lead. Robert has used Agile techniques for over six years and is particularly fond of XP although he's currently warming to Kanban. Currently at C3 Business Solutions, Robert has championed Agile use within C3 and leads a team dedicated to producing quality business intelligence tools.
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Victor Rodrigues - Head of Audiological Software, Cochlear
Victor Rodrigues is the Head of Audiological Software for Cochlear, whom he has been with for 11 years. He has over 19 years experience in the software development space. He previously worked in fields as diverse as manufacturing control systems, service station and postal management systems and medical devices. Victor introduced and spearheaded the implementation of Agile methods at Cochlear five years ago. Since then, several teams across the organisation have been using Agile methods and practices. He is a co-author of a technical information report on the use of Agile methods and practices in the medical device industry which was commissioned by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI).
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Jay Rogers - Interaction Designer, Atlassian
Jay Rogers has worked in enterprise tools GUI design for 14 years, focusing on web applications. Jay spoke at UX Australia 2011 on "Mockupitis" and at Agile UX 2012 on "Agile Culture Artifacts". Lately he's been helping kick off the Sydney chapter of the Interaction Design Association. He cooks great Mexican food, and explains how to cook Mexican in Australia at oz-mex.com.
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James Ross - Senior Engineering Manager, Aconex
Having swalloed the eXtreme Programming pill in 2001, James Ross has been through several phases of Agile, from epiphany to consulting evangelism to quiet corporate despair and, with any luck now, to a bit of pragmatism and perspective. He is the co-author of what he thinks is the only book that takes a test-driven approach to the teaching of fundamental computer algorithms. It might be the only one because it's not a very good idea!
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Fiona Siseman - Project Manager, Lonely Planet
Fiona Siseman works at Lonely Planet in Melbourne as a Project Manager on Agile teams. She is currently working on the team building the Shared Publishing Platform which is revolutionising the way that Lonely Planet collects and organises its content. Fiona holds the rare distinction of having worked with every department at Lonely Planet and was there for every step of Lonely Planet's transformation to an Agile enterprise, where Agile and Lean practices are used from software delivery to legal to print product development. A master of 'getting stuff done', Fiona has also employed Agile techniques in managing the construction of an outdoor deck at home!
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Carolyn Smart - General Manager, Enterprise Program Management, Telstra
Carolyn Smart leads Enterprise Program Management in Telstra, and is responsible for the processes and systems used to govern programs and projects across the company. Carolyn is a passionate advocate of Agile and is excited by the potential for cultural change and improved leadership it brings. Carolyn has been the Product Owner for a successful Agile program for the last two years and led the first release of an Agile project at Telstra. Carolyn is currently driving alignment of the Telstra governance and funding model to support Agile.
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Craig Smith - Agile Coach, Suncorp
Craig Smith has been active in the IT industry for over 15 years. He has been an Agile practitioner for over 10 years and is a Certified Scrum Master and a member of both the Scrum Alliance and Agile Alliance. He is currently working within Suncorp's Business Services division as an Agile Coach, on a number of high profile technical and business projects. He is a regular trainer for the Agile Academy, has presented at a number of international conferences and is also an Agile Editor for InfoQ.
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Darren Smith - Market Lead for Technology, ThoughtWorks
Darren Smith is Market Lead of Technology (QLD and NSW) for ThoughtWorks Australia, where he spends much of his time advising clients on technology strategy, enterprise architecture and software delivery practices. His 17 years of experience in the IT industry has been spent working in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia and has required practical knowledge and implementation skills across development, support, project management and architecture. His current passion is in helping organisations to realise ways in which to better align business and technology objectives without compromising quality or efficiency.
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Brent Snook - Software Developer, Zooatrope
Brent Snook has been making software for over 10 years and has a passion for quality in all aspects of the craft and aims to ignite the same in others. He has developed for and coached in a number of organisations, helping them to solve their problems by applying Lean/Agile principles. Brent is an active member of various technology and development practice groups both in Melbourne and London.
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Kurt Solarte - Senior Managing Consultant, IBM
Kurt Solarte is a Senior Managing Consultant and the Agile Practice Lead with IBM Rational Software in Sydney focusing on Agile development and Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management. Kurt was recently with IBM Global Business Services in the US where he specialised in keeping business analysis alive and relevant in the Agile delivery of e-commerce, web portal, and business analytics projects. Kurt is also guest lecturer at UNSW and UTS; and regularly publishes for both IBM and industry publications on topics of Agile/Lean development, Disciplined Agile Delivery and agility@scale.
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Alexandra Stokes - Head of ADM, AIA
Alexandra Stokes is an IT leader who is interested in building high performing teams and increasing IT capabilities. Alex works with business leaders to facilitate good returns on their IT and software spend. She is a driver of Agile techniques and principles to prioritise work; maximising business value, in concert with immersion in the business domain.
Alexandra has recently joined AIA Australia and is spear-heading an Agile transformation in her role as the Head of Application Development and Maintenance. This challenge encompasses a large Asian offshore capability and the cultural richness that comes with it.
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Tom Sulston - Consultant, ThoughtWorks UK
Tom Sulston works for ThoughtWorks in London as a consultant in the build and release space and loves the whole DevOps thing. He has previously spoken at Agile and XP conferences on continuous integration tools and build pipeline practices.
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Bram Surti - Senior Mainframe Developer and Scrum Master, Bank of New Zealand
Bram Surti is a senior mainframe developer with over 15 years experience in the IT industry. In the past two and a half years he has stepped into the realm of Agile as a Scrum Master, running a number of Scrum teams. He has also spent some time coaching others on Agile values and Scrum practices. More recently he has become involved with Kanban and Lean Software development.
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Cara Talbot - Commercial Business Solutions Lead, GE Capital
Cara Talbot has over 15 years experience in project, change management and business improvement disciplines, working in both the public and private sectors. With over a decade of experience in the UK, Cara has spent the last four years with Vero Insurance, most recently as the Earthquake Reinstatement Programme manager. Cara has been an active Agile coach for the past four years and led a voluntary Agile group within Vero of over 20 members.
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Peter Tansey - Agile Team Leader, Petoni Mahi
An Agile leader and coach with over 30 years experience in software development, Pete still loves the buzz of working with new Agile project teams as they learn how to successfully partner with the business to deliver early and often.
His speciality is helping Project Managers and Business Analysts understand how to best adapt their skills to suit the highly collaborative and self organising world of Agile project teams.
As well as contributing to the successful delivery of Agile projects, Pete partners with Software Education and the Agile Academy to deliver Agile training in New Zealand and Australia.
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Sarah Taraporewalla - Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Sarah Taraporewalla is a Lead Consultant working for ThoughtWorks, where she specialises in developing robust software for the future, delivered today. She has acted as developer, software architect, technical lead and Agile coach for many projects. Although primarily focused on software design, Sarah has also had a lot to say about how software can be developed to accommodate the changing pace of business, and how people should be treated within teams.
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Nick Thorpe - Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Nick Thorpe is a lead Agile consultant with a background in Agile coaching and delivery in Melbourne, Australia. In the last few years Nicholas has helped many teams use these techniques and processes both inside and outside of the software world, in fields such as IT operations, publishing and layout, mostly at Lonely Planet. Even teams of lawyers have used these techniques to improve the way they work together.
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Renee Troughton - Agile Coach, Suncorp
Renee Troughton is an Agile Coach with over 15 years of experience in software development, coaching and organisational change. Specialising in large scale adoption, Renee has spent eight years working with teams and organisations applying a variety of implementation models including undercover evangelists to broad reaching, cross government department governance changes. A Certified Scrum Master, Renee applies techniques from Scrum, XP, Kanban and Lean into non-software development domains.
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Erik van Eekelen - Lead Business Analyst, Elabor8
Erik van Eekelen is a Lead Business Analyst with years of experience in both traditional and Agile environments. He currently works for Elabor8, a boutique business analysis consultancy and consults companies in Agile and BA techniques. Before Erik moved over to Australia, he worked as a manager of 13 BAs for Netherlands' largest online retailer bol.com. At bol.com he helped to set up and coach the company-wide successful introduction of the Scrum Agile method and moved his BA team from traditional methodology to the Agile world.
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Dylan Verheijden - Agile Delivery Coach, NAB
Dylan Verheijden has been a leader in the adoption of Agile at NAB for several years now, initially through applying it in his Development Lead and ScrumMaster roles and establishing the NAB Agile Community of Practice in 2010 and leading it since. Over the last few years Dylan has driven the adoption of Agile engineering practices (such as Continuous Delivery) and Agile Delivery processes (such as Scrum), across the broader organisation in roles such as Agile Delivery Coach. Along the way, he has found adapting Agile to the needs of organisational leaders and threading organisational change management principles through everything to be absolutely invaluable, as well as an area of passion for him.
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Kristan Vingrys - Test Practice Lead, ThoughtWorks
In his role as the global Test Practice Lead for ThoughtWorks, Kristan Vingrys has been involved in solution delivery, coaching and mentoring teams with a focus on testing, Agile processes, and how they compliment each other. Kristan has more than 12 years of experience in software testing with hands on experience as a test analyst, test team lead, consultant, and test manager. He has worked with products and applications in a diverse range of industries including telecommunications, finance, insurance, media, and logistics.
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Kelly Waters - Executive Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Kelly Waters is an Executive Consultant and transformation practice lead for ThoughtWorks Australia. He specialises in optimising or transforming IT organisations through the successful implementation of Agile methods, and driving online growth through digital technology and product development. He has 27 years experience in the software development industry, and over 10 years at executive level. Prior to joining ThoughtWorks in Australia, Kelly was Web Technology Director for IPC Media group in London, where he was responsible for digital development and web infrastructure for all 60 brands. During this time, he led the successful transformation to Agile methods and drove substantial online growth. Kelly has also been a voluntary business advisor for Young Enterprise, an organisation that helps young people to gain business skills through practical experience. He is also the author of one of the most popular blogs about Agile methods, 'All About Agile', and before moving to Australia won an award for 'Most Valuable Agile Player in the UK'.
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Meaghan Waters - Lead Experience Designer, ThoughtWorks
Meaghan Waters has spent 18 years creating user experiences both on and off the screen for small and large clients. Meaghan is a firm believer that people deserve good experiences both in creating and consuming products. Leveraging user-centred discovery and design techniques, Meaghan has created major user experiences for clients including Cancer Australia, NBN Co, Lastminute.com and NSW Attorney General's Department, Meaghan is an engaging presenter - just ask NSW's Supreme Court judges.
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Paul Watson - Agile Coach, Suncorp
Paul Watson has been involved in building software in the utility, travel and finance sectors for more than 15 years. Paul has spent the last eight years involved in Agile projects at Suncorp, including the last two years as an Agile Coach, where he has been an early adopter of Agile, and has used Agile practices and techniques while delivering projects, managing portfolio governance and leading teams. Recently Paul has been focussed on simplifying project and portfolio governance across Suncorp.
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Rick Weaver - Program Director, IBM Rational Software Services
Rick Weaver is a director for IBM Rational Software Development and Services. Since joining IBM Rational in 2006, Rick's focus has been helping customers become more Agile and successful in improving their software development, an ongoing theme and motivator for him throughout his 23 years at IBM. He has also led efforts to improve Rational's internal software development processes as part of IBM's own Agile transformation. Currently Rick leads both the Rational "Unleash the Labs" program and the IBM Rational service delivery and global engagement teams focused on helping clients around the world adopt Agile practices, deploy new tools and implement new processes successfully.
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Rob White - Senior Developer, Bank of New Zealand
Rob White is currently a senior software developer at the Bank of New Zealand. He has over 25 years experience in the IT industry in a wide variety of roles and companies in the UK and New Zealand. He has worked largely in a technical capacity in a range of industries including automotive, manufacturing, retail and financial services. His technical background is primarily in the IBM Mainframe (or z/series) arena but in recent years he has worked in the integration space, which led to his exposure with the Websphere toolset and Object Oriented languages like Java. He has been working in a Scrum environment for the last two years and has become increasingly involved in helping solve technical issues in the integration of Agile practices at the bank.
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Rick Wingfield - Chief Information Officer, AIA
Rick Wingfield has over 16 years of technology, project, development and strategic consulting experience and has worked in a variety of business and geographical cultures. He joined AIA Australia as CIO in December 2010 and is currently championing an Agile transformation that includes an IT team located in Melbourne, Guangzhou and Beijing. Rick is a passionate, delivery focused, financial services technology leader who enjoys creating high performing teams and using Agile approaches to solve business problems.
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Herry Wiputra - Iteration Manager, REA Group
Herry Wiputra is an Iteration Manager with over 10 years of experience in software development, coaching and leading teams. He was introduced to Agile more than three years ago and since then he has never looked back. He has since spent most of his time helping organisations build self-organising, high performance Agile teams with the focus on building high quality product. In his current role as Iteration Manager for REA Group, he is helping his distributed Agile team to adopt Lean start-up principles for its delivery process.
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Tony Young - Product Architect, Development Team Manager, Integrated Research
Tony Young has 18 years of software development experience, with the last 15 years at Integrated Research working up from a trainee. Over that time he has worked on OS/2, HP NonStop, Windows, and most Unix flavours, with exposure to some VoIP vendors such as Cisco and Avaya. He became a Team Lead when working on the Unix port of Integrated Research's product architecture, and has maintained a leadership role for over 10 years, while also assuming an Architect role over the last eight. He has been learning Agile practices for the last three years and been active in its adoption and improvement across a department of 60 developers across eight teams, in a 15 year young architecture.
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Robin Zaragoza - Product Manager, eBay.com
Robin Zaragoza has been managing products for start-ups and large companies in the e-commerce space for the last seven years. After a stint as a manager for a well-known alternative rock band, she worked as an account and marketing manager for World Travel Holdings, the largest seller of cruises in the world, then went on to design and launch products for a number of successful small and large brands. She has worked with globally distributed teams in India, London, Boston, Croatia, China and the Carribean. Robin has worked mainly with Agile and scrum teams and her portfolio of products in the market include the ticketing system for an events-based social networking site purchased by AOL and the train booking site Quno.com. She currently manages the deals platform and retail marketing systems for eBay.
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