Speakers
Diana Adorno
Product Designer & Researcher, ThoughtWorks
Diana is a designer, researcher and strategist who produces digital products using an Agile and Lean approach. She continually experiments with different aspects of the design process to reveal intuitive, feasible designs as well as the transformation for people and organisations. She has worked across many industries and pulls insights across all of them. She has a technical, design and a qualitative research background in Cognitive Anthropology. Diana has worked globally as consultant on digital products in Australia, Asia, UK and Europe.
SESSION: Deep customer research…fast
Elise Aplin
Product Manager, Clover.com.au
For the past year, Elise has worked as the Product Manager at Clover.com.au, a fintech start-up based out of Melbourne. Prior to this Elise was a consultant with ThoughtWorks where she worked as a facilitator, agile coach, analyst, mentor and teacher. She has experience working hands on in agile teams as well as helping businesses discover opportunities and building high-functioning teams to pursue them. Previously Elise has talked about the difficulties in building a real Minimum Viable Product, how to create cross-functional teams of ‘T-shaped’ people and building an inclusive tech industry.
SESSION: From a laptop in a box to a successful product launch
Joshua Arnold
Engineer, Black Swan Farming
With a background in Engineering, Joshua works with organisations around the world to improve flow and develop products users love and teams love building. His work at Maersk has become a popular case study for the application of Cost of Delay, improving prioritisation and flow across large portfolios. Joshua’s work has been referenced in many books, including the best-selling “Lean Enterprise – How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale”. Blackswanfarming.com has become a popular resource for Product Managers. Recently returned after 13 years based in London, Joshua never managed to shake his native New Zealand accent. He is most happy when wearing a rubber suit, riding a moving wall of water.
SESSION: Cost of Delay | Deep Dive
Julia Baird
Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster and author based in Sydney, Australia. She hosts The Drum on ABCTV and writes columns for The Sydney Morning Herald and the International New York Times. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications including Newsweek, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian, the Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar. Her biography of Queen Victoria will be published in the US this fall by Random House, New York, in Australia by Harper Collins and in the UK by Little Brown.
In 2005, Baird was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at Harvard. Her Ph.D., on female politicians and the press, formed the basis of her book, Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (2004).
She is a regular commentator on television and radio. She has also become expert in making play-doh, bug catchers and brownies for her two little kids, and lives near the sea, which she swims in as long and often as she can.
SESSION: The contagious impact of deliberate leadership – Ballroom A (Level 3)
Dave Bales
Agile Coach, AgileMe
Dave has been in software development for 24 years, managed software development teams for 10 years, and is a Certified Enterprise Coach with the Scrum Alliance. Over the past 10 years Dave has been helping organisations to adopt Agile approaches and enable their teams.
SESSION: Causal loop diagrams
Kim Ballestrin
Principal Consultant, Elabor8
Kim Ballestrin is a passionate and highly skilled Principal Consultant at Elabor8 working on the Agile transformations of large enterprises. She has over 20 years of diverse management (IT) experience, and since 2010 has been an Agile engagement lead in the telco industry helping one of Australia’s most prominent organisations on their Agile change journey. Kim is an experienced technologist, having worked in roles from IT business analyst through to program and delivery centre management. She specialises in Lean, Cynefin, Agile, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, DevOps and ideas to improve the ways that companies work and deliver value to customers. Currently the organiser of the Melbourne Cynefin and Lean Coffee Meetups, Kim regularly presents and runs workshops at leading local and international conferences on the Cynefin Framework, Decision Mapping and Early Idea Feasibility.
SESSION: Financial basics
Isabel Bantegui
Senior Manager, Financial Services, Accenture
Isabel is a Senior Manager in Accenture’s Financial Services Distribution & Marketing practice. She has over 10 experience in delivering large scale transformation programs across North America, Asia and Australia. Her passion lies in human-centred design, driving innovation through understanding our customers and delivering solutions that can flex and evolve to meet their liquid expectations.
Christopher Biggs
Consultant
Christopher Biggs has been into Open Systems since the early 90s and was there at the birth of Linux and 386BSD. His interest in electronics and connected devices goes back even further. He has worked as a developer, System Architect and Engineering Manager. He was founding Vice President of HUMBUG, the Brisbane open systems user group, and built and managed a diverse, inclusive team of over 60 developers at a leading Brisbane IT company. He has presented at conferences and user groups around Australia, and convened a weekly technology lecture series for the entire technology department at a previous workplace. Christopher now works as a consultant specialising in IoT and Cloud Data. In his spare time he builds and blogs robots and adds to the growing IoT.
SESSION: Continuous dashboarding
Andrea Blundell
Agile Coach, MYOB
Andrea Blundell is an Agile coach and facilitator who is focused on creating ways of working that inspire our workplaces of the future to be purposeful, fluid, and connected.
For over 10 years she has worked as a scrum master and Agile coach in diverse industries from visual effects to health. Working with people to develop self organising teams, creative leadership, and enable organisational agility is where Andrea’s passion and experience align.
Anthony Boteler
Occupational Therapist and owner of Biota Occupational Therapy
Anthony Boteler began his Occupational Therapy journey after a successful sporting career where he was honoured to represent Australia on a world stage. After moving to Melbourne from Perth he started his own Occupational Therapy business.
He is a family man who is passionate about helping people lead a healthy, meaningful, and independent life.
SESSION: Including autism – the person first
Estie Boteler
Delivery Lead, REA Group
Estie Boteler is a Delivery Lead at REA where she was brought in to help create a brand new team that is focussing on everything around the Consumer’s Identity for realestate.com.au
She has been involved with software development for most of her life, working as a developer, Business Analyst, Iteration Manager and Delivery Lead ranging from small startups to multinational organisations in South Africa, the US and Australia. Her passion is to help build happy, high functioning and diverse teams.
SESSION: Including autism – the person first
Breisi Brito
Head of Digital Innovation, RedFig Consulting
Breisi Brito is passionate about Agile teams and digital innovation, and the wonders that can be achieved by applying the right mindset. Breisi has over 16 years’ experience in the design, evaluation and improvement of online systems. She began her career as a web developer, pushing the limits of technologies to see how to best make them work for the end user. She has worked in great Agile teams in BA, BA Lead, Test Lead, UX Lead, Scrum Master, Delivery Manager and Agile Coach roles. Currently she is the Head of Digital Innovation for RedFig Consulting, working with a team of great minds.
Craig Brown
VP Collaboration, Aconex
Craig Brown is the VP of Collaboration and Integration at Aconex. Based in Melbourne but working across four continents, he is a champion for working smarter and better. He has deep experience with the Agile industry, getting started with formally managing projects using Agile techniques in 2005. Craig is a frequent host and facilitator of Agile meetups in Melbourne, and arranges industry conferences in Melbourne and overseas. He’s taught Agile and project management training courses as well as being an all-round swell guy.
SESSION: Ten years after adopting Agile
Holly Brown
Project Manager, Client Case Management, Australian Red Cross
Holly Brown has 17 years’ experience is in delivering business improvement projects in NGO and government agencies in both Australia and the UK. She has been with Red Cross for the past five years in a number of roles leading quality, systems and reporting projects. Holly is currently Project Manager for a business transformation project aimed at improving client centric service delivery. Prior to Red Cross she held management roles in social housing and employment sectors all with a focus on driving change and improvement in systems and process. She is keen to further develop partnerships between the Agile and Not For Profit communities.
SESSION: Can anyone adopt Agile?
Rowan Bunning
Principal Trainer and Agile Coach, Scrum WithStyle
Rowan Bunning is an Australian pioneer of the world’s most widely used Agile framework: Scrum. Rowan has a technical development background and spent years as a developer, Scrum Master and Product Owner before becoming one of Australia’s first Agile Coaches. Rowan has trained over 4,000 people in Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia since 2008, making him one of the most experienced Agile trainers in the Australasian region. As an Agile Coach in Australia and Europe since 2007, Rowan has a track record of facilitating accelerated Agile transformations including team building, ScrumMaster mentoring, management consulting and cultural change. Rowan has coached organisations ranging from startups to global brand-name enterprises across the banking, health insurance, real estate, media, food, building security, data security, collection management, content management and video gaming industries as well as the public sector.
SESSION: Agile adoption stories from highly varied organisational cultures
Mike Burns
Agile Coach, Tatts Group
With over 15 years in IT and experience as a software developer, business analyst and project manager, Mike Burns’ current role as an Agile Coach at Tatts Group has seen him increase his Agile knowledge and coaching skills. Mike brings calmness and common sense to problems and helps teams by providing examples, guidance, mentoring and the ability to get team members to seek the answers for themselves. Metrics have become somewhat of a passion for Mike and he is interested in how tools can continually monitor and measure to provide insights that lead to improved performance.
SESSION: Three baseline metrics
Stephanie BySouth
Director, Authentika
Stephanie BySouth started her business career as owner/operator of a boutique design consultancy. With the advent of the .com era she moved to leading great digital delivery teams across leading businesses including Australian Business Theatre, REA Group and as Head of IT for Classified Adventures’ senior investment team. Today Steph is an Agile business coach energising innovative outcomes for smart companies. Her current focus is supporting SEEK and Smart StartUps. Her unique expertise lies in being an x-ray for operational patterns, product performance and empowering people to their best.
SESSION: The frontier to leadership agility
Nadia Carballo
Learning Planning and Budgeting Consultant, Suncorp
Nadia Carballo’s career to date has primarily been focused in human resources across multiple disciplines which include training and development and people development. She also has had extensive experience in customer service. Nadia gained exposure to change management as a McDonald’s manager when management teams (made up of 3-4 managers) would be transferred to franchise stores that were due to undergo transformation in their daily operations.
For the past three years, she has managed group-wide learning and development programs such as Study Support and Suncorp traineeships and was appointed as the Learning Planning and Budgeting Consultant in May 2016. Since the commencement of the role she, along with her colleague Alison have worked on embedding an Agile way of working within Suncorp Learning.
Her key interests lie in people development, training and education. She has a passion and drive for continuous improvement not only at an organisation level but personal level as well.
SESSION: Building an effective learning team
Chris Chan
Enterprise Agility Coach
Chris Chan is an Enterprise Agility Coach with deep and broad experience in software and product development who cares about humanising the workplace. He specialises in Agile and business transformations and helping executives, teams and individuals to apply Agile values, principles and practices that thrive within their specific environment. His mission is to build learning organisations that honour the individual, give everyone the chance to do what they do best, and harness the power of team to amplify great work to produce great business and customer outcomes.
Coaching and mentoring people through large transitions has given Chris some of his most enjoyable moments. He has a particular interest in innovation and applying Lean Startup in large enterprises. He is helping people and teams get better, one small step at a time through incremental learning. Chris is active in the Agile community as an organiser of meetups.
SESSION: Pirate metrics
Rob Ciolli
Senior Developer, REA Group
Rob Ciolli is a full stack polyglot agilist. He is a mobile developer with no religious affiliation with either iOS or Android.
SESSION: The rise of the tigermonkey
Ayal Cohen
R&D Chief Functional Architect, Application Delivery Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Ayal Cohen is the Chief Functional Architect for Application Delivery Management Research and Development organization business unit within HPE Software. Responsible for driving the success and integration of product solutions across the entire ADM portfolio including ALM, ALM Octane, Predictive ADM, Mobile, Virtualization, Performance Testing and Functional Testing.
Ayal has over 15 years expertise in designing, architecture of products, building vision and creating road-maps, working with hundreds of companies worldwide to provide counsel on DevOps, Continuous Integration & Testing, automation and more.
SESSION: Lessons learned from transforming DevOps to a high-scale model: HPE R&D labs’ practical experience
Pete Cohen
Senior Consultant – Agile Business Analyst and Iteration Manager, DiUS Computing
Pete Cohen is a Senior Consultant and Iteration Manager at DiUS. He has helped clients ranging from enterprises to startups in understanding their best opportunities to create value, and then to execute Agile software projects successfully. He frequently shares his learnings in the Agile community, and has spoken at several conferences including Agile Australia and LAST. His other passion is creating positive social impact through technology, which he has achieved through playing a leading role in Random Hacks of Kindness. More recently he co-founded Flying Robot School which teaches kids about drones and inspires them to pursue meaningful careers.
SESSION: “GameDay” – achieving resilience through chaos engineering
Invited Speaker
Simon Cohen
Spotify
Simon Cohen has been working with software and software engineers for the past 18 years. He’s managed in companies from three person startups to 80,000 person multinationals. He now works at Spotify NYC, where he is a servant leader responsible for helping a team of engineers be happy and become more awesome.
SESSION: Coaching is for losers | Deep Dive
David Colwell
Solution Architect, Tricentis – The Continuous Testing Company
David Colwell has been in the testing industry for nearly 10 years. He started out as a data entry grunt, where he rapidly got sick of the repetitive work, and discovered a test automation tool, Win Runner from a conversation with someone in the testing team. He then automated his daily job, and was subsequently given notice. However, the test manager took him under his wing and taught him everything there is to know about testing and test automation. This experience prepared him to become Automation Mentor for One Patch. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed as a Technical test lead at DX Solutions, a second-time BRW Fast 100 company. Over the course of the next 5 years, David got promoted to Head of QA at DX Solutions, with a team of over 85 test engineers, leads and managers. After leaving DX Solutions, he got hired by Tricentis, a start-up based in Austria to lead the APAC technical division as Lead Solution Architect.
SESSION: Session-based Exploratory Testing
John Contad
Senior Systems Engineer, REA Group
John Contad is an avid teacher, nerdy musician, and motorcycle dork by night. Mornings, he supports and assists teams at realestate.com.au in their journey to the cloud. Prior to this, he toured Australia by bike, spent time in startups in the Sunshine Coast, and worked at companies in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan. Melbourne is his hometown.
Gabor Devenyi
Agile Coach, DXC Technology
Gabor Devenyi loves the Agile principles and value statements – but more importantly he loves working with people and helping to get the best out of them. He is an enthusiastic person with 20 years of work experience across different business areas and industries. His helpful disposition and willingness to go the extra mile has helped many teams and organisations to achieve the best outcome possible. Currently Gabor is working as a senior consultant at CSC Consulting. In addition to helping customers to deliver value, Gabor is an active participant in the Agile community in Melbourne. He also facilitates training sessions globally within the CSC organisation.
SESSION: Most inspirational tweets of 2017
Alison Douglas
Learning Quality and Standards Specialist, Suncorp
Alison Douglas has extensive experience in learning and development, project and change management and stakeholder relationship management, both within Australia and overseas.
She is passionate about learning and have a genuine interest in continuous development, always looking for opportunities to create efficiencies and add value. Her career has been predominantly spent with two employers, Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) and Trade and Suncorp.
With DFAT she worked in a variety of roles, both in the Brisbane office and the Australian High Commission, United Kingdom.
Alison’s key roles were Regional Trainer for UK, Middle East, Africa and Europe, Passports Systems Administrator and Consular Operations. Her last 7 years have been with Suncorp where she has worked in HR roles in Rehabilitation, Rewards and more recently Learning. Over the last seven months she has been working with Nadia Carballo to embed an Agile Way of Working across the learning function under Charles Randles’s guidance.
SESSION: Building an effective learning team
Matt Fellows
Senior Software Engineer, DiUS Computing
Matt Fellows is a Senior Software Engineer at DiUS and a self-described polyglot who enjoys working at the intersection of technology, humans and ideas – ideally fully caffeinated – and has been doing so at startups through to enterprises since Y2K was a thing. He’s passionate about giving back to the tech community, sharing learnings at local meetups and Conferences, and is a core contributor to the popular Pact microservices testing framework and author of the Muxy chaos testing tool. When not absorbing the Internet via osmosis, he can be found teaching kids at Code Club, playing basketball or pumping iron like Arnie.
SESSION: “GameDay” – achieving resilience through chaos engineering
Anna Fiofilova
Senior Developer, REA Group
Anna Fiofilova grew up in the Ukraine and from early on developed a keen interest in mathematics and was lucky enough to learn basic programming at school. This resulted in her enrolling to study Computer Systems at Networks at her local university and completing a Masters degree. Anna moved to Melbourne in 2012 (just before the Higgs Boson was discovered) and joined ThoughtWorks, where she learned about gender diversity, what ‘Agile’ really means, and had the chance to work with a great group of smart people. Anna now works with REA Group as a Senior Developer. Throughout her career, Anna has faced many challenges relating to her gender, including bullying, discrimination, and ignorance, and will share some of her experiences at this year’s Conference.
SESSION: Women in IT survival guide
Pru Gell
Facilitator, Mediator and Educator
Pru Gell is an experienced facilitator, mediator and educator passionate about the art and science of helping people work better together. Her consultancy has enabled impactful change and leadership programs across a range of sectors for over a decade. To equip her to be an architect of change with diverse audiences, Pru uses the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy, which grew out of the complex time in Post-Apartheid South Africa. She is a globally accredited instructor. Using this method she creates space for genuine collaboration, ignites innovative thinking, and effective decision-making that people buy into and builds shared understanding.
Tiago Griffo
Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Tiago Griffo is a technologist at heart and at ThoughtWorks, loves to solve technical problems and transform organisations to be Agile in all aspects. He has worked mostly in consulting companies but has also done a few years of developing software packages. He has worked in organisations with traditional software delivery methods – although he’s not proud of that, so he tries to make up for it by transforming other organisations to be Agile. He has worked in numerous COTS implementation and integration projects in the financial, energy and educational industries.
SESSION: Hypothesis driven software selection
Melinda Harrington
Senior Agile Delivery Manager, Bupa (Digital)
Evolved from product management to project management and then to Scrum, Melinda Harrington is currently deepening her understanding of Scrum and exploring principles of scaling, Lean, XP, Kanban, User Centered Design and DevOps. Melinda has worked in product development at multiple agencies, a startup, enterprise organisations, a non-profit, and a company that ranks #1 in their category in the world. She is the Co-Author of Computer Resources for People with Disabilities and author of the Cycle Time article published in AgileTODAY (Volume #13).
Lisa Harvey-Smith
Research Astronomer
Associate Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith is an astronomer at the CSIRO. She studies the birth and death of stars and the growth of supermassive black holes. She is the Project Scientist for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. She won the 2016 Australian Museum’s Eureka Prize for the Promotion of Australian Science Research, was a co-recipient of the CSIRO Chairman’s Medal 2015 and was named in The Sydney Morning Herald’s 100 most influential people in 2012. She is a team leader at the Australia Telescope National Facility and is a member of several national and international science advisory committees.
Lisa regularly mentors students in schools located in Sydney and at Pia Wadjarri, a remote aboriginal community in Western Australia. She advocates for a level playing field for everyone working in astronomy. Her work as a former Chair of the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Chapter for Women in Astronomy culminated in the launch of The Pleiades Awards, a national accreditation scheme for employers of astronomers in Australia that take steps towards achieving best practice in equity and diversity. She now serves on the project management team of CSIRO’s diversity self-assessment group.
SESSION: Deep Dive | Dark Matter
Amilia Hird
Senior Manager Digital Adoption, National Australia Bank
Amilia has over 15 years’ banking experience across CRM, Digital, Product and Sales in NAB’s Institutional and Business bank. Amilia has lead teams delivering CRM capability to sales teams. A passionate advocate for CRM and its ability to unlock value, Amilia was recently the Product Owner working with Accenture assessing the ability to transform the way technology is delivered into a complex banking environment. Amilia is currently Senior Manager Digital Adoption, in the Business and Private Bank at National Australia Bank.
Asy Israel
Director, Program Management and DevOps Application Delivery Management Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Asy Israel is the R&D director for Program Management and DevOps for the Application Delivery Management business unit within HPE Software, Responsible for driving Release and Program management and DevOps practices across the entire ADM portfolio. Asy oversees the overall program with teams that manages releases of Lifecycle management (Quality Center, Agile Manager and ALM), Performance testing, Functional testing and Mobile & Virtualization.
Asy has more than 15 years’ experience in software and telecom industry, in which he served in different roles across the product lifecycle chain, varied from DevOps, integration and quality assurance roles through release management and customer facing roles. Through this period he serves as change-agent and overseen the way R&D delivers software through the constant changes in the market.
Prior to joining HPE, Asy worked at Comverse.
SESSION: Lessons learned from transforming DevOps to a high-scale model: HPE R&D labs’ practical experience
Ralf Jeffery
Business Analyst, Equal Experts
Ralf Jeffery is currently a Senior Consultant Business Analyst at Equal Experts, an award-winning Agile consultancy, specialising in simple software solutions for big business challenges. With over 20 years’ experience delivering enhanced digital user experiences for organisations such as O2, Visa, World Pay, Coutts and Argos, Ralf is passionate about devising new solutions to drastically improve user experience (UX) and ultimately deliver business value. Ralf is a certified scrum master and ISEB practitioner. With a background in digital agencies and consultancies, as well as being a company owner himself, Ralf understands the perspectives of key stakeholders groups – winning their confidence through delivering advanced digital vision and technical solutions to drive additional revenue streams. He is operationally and commercially astute with high levels of business acuity and really enjoys building strong teams and delivering successful solutions.
SESSION: Putting the ‘V’ in MVP
Hanna Karlsson
Agile coach, Skillseekers
Hanna Karlsson started her career in IT in Scandinavia over 10 years ago, and has been working across a wide range of roles including product management, business analysis, project management and training. The last few years she has focused on leading teams and Agile coaching, where she thrives on creating happy, highly functioning teams.
SESSION: Get your brain in the right mind
Martin Kearns
Chief Digital Officer, Innodev
Martin is a pioneer in the field of Agile, he was one of first three certified enterprise coaches in the world by the Scrum Alliance. He was also accredited as an Agile expert by Dr. Alistair Cockburn and has been a practitioner in Agile methods for over 12 years. His pragmatic approach and genuine thirst for personal growth is evident in his authentic stories and examples he uses to illustrate concepts in a training setting.
Recently, Martin has been examining the significance of Agile in becoming an operational mindset for the future of work. He is now the Chief Digital Officer of Innodev and is focused on the synergy between partners, people and problems to generate the need for adaption. Through his work in contracting methods, Martin has designed cooperative partnerships in response to uncertainty. He has spoken at numerous Australian Conferences on this topic and his thought leadership has been recognised through his selection to speak at an upcoming Scrum Alliance Global Gathering in Dublin later this year.
Martin actively contributes to the Scrum community in Australia, being a director of Scrum Australia and frequent speaker at user groups and Conferences. Martin is a co-author of the e-book Agile Transition (available through InfoQ), in which he and his co-author share their observations and conclusions about what is required when seeking to transition to an agile approach and the future of work.
SESSION: Starting on the right foot
Katrina Kolt
Agile Coach, AGL
Katrina Kolt is an energetic Enterprise Agile Coach and People Leader, with more than 20 years’ experience as an IT Project Manager, Scrum Master and Product Owner. She has supported organisations including Telstra, Australia Post, Deakin University, GE Capital and AGL to optimise customer experience and deliver on digital goals. Katrina is an influencer, expert at building business agility by supporting teams and leaders and embedding a Lean startup mindset. Katrina is passionate about peer to peer learning, having established several communities of practice including Geelong Lean Coffee and Richmond Lean Coffee. She is a keen blogger, who shares ideas at agilesista.com. Katrina strongly believes in the strength of diversity and works to create organisations that attract and retain great people.
Steven Kuo
Senior Consultant, Holistic Agile
Steven Kuo is a Holistic Agile Consultant who has coached many entrepreneurs and corporate leadership on the values of Lean and agility, helping them achieve transformative changes to their teams and business. Steven successfully combines Chinese martial philosophy into his personal and corporate coaching, inspiring many within his team to go beyond performing Agile practices, but also to embark on a lifelong journey of servanthood, personal mastery, and agility. Steven has been invited to speak at events both within the Agile circle and in business conferences. The Australian and Sydney Enterprise Agile Meetup has interviewed Steven for his knowledge on Agile and technology innovation topics.
SESSION: Understanding the DevOps elephant
Michael Le
Product Designer, Pivotal Labs
Michael Le is a product designer who has worked in New York, London and now Sydney. He started at Toyota learning Kanban, moved into Scrum with financial services and now is practicing XP. Currently he is focused on helping companies incorporate a user centred process into building digital products. On the side, he is a father, part-time app developer and general foodie.
SESSION: Aligning impact and understanding from boardrooms to pixels
Alex Logan
Product Manager, Ordermentum
Alexander Logan is a Product Manager who specialises in driving vision and roadmaps for businesses. He focuses on collaboration between customer and company, with cross-functional teams to deliver successful results. Alexander’s specialties include eCommerce, B2B, web applications, iOS/Android applications, product strategy and managing a roadmap. Alexander is passionate about mobile applications, product management, product analytics and Agile methodologies. Alexander is motivated to know why things are being done the way they are. He is passionate about solving a task that has been done poorly for some time and figuring out how to improve, or replace, the process. He believes all teams should be working toward continuous improvement.
SESSION: Saving the plane from a nosedive
Troy Magennis
Consultant, Focused Objective
Troy Magennis is the founder and consultant for Focused Objective LLC, a quantitative analysis and forecasting vendor for the software industry. Troy regularly speaks at industry conferences and promotes the better use of historical data, metrics and quantitative techniques to anyone who listens. Troy has worked at all levels of the technology industry for the last 30 years, from entry level positions to Vice President for 1,000+ person technology organisations Sabre Airlines, Travelocity, LastMinute.com, and Corbis, and now consults for major companies like Tableau Software, Microsoft, Skype, Walmart, Siemens and LeanKit.
SESSION: Forecasting using data
Sandy Mamoli
Agile Coach, Nomad8
Sandy Mamoli is an Agile consultant at Nomad8 with a focus on culture and leadership. She moved to New Zealand in 2007 (for a brief trial period) and has been living in Wellington and Auckland ever since. From working with global enterprises in Amsterdam, Stockholm and Copenhagen to being one of NZ’s leading coaches, she brings her practical flair and passionate advocacy for all things Agile to businesses around the world. Sandy is a former Olympian, a geek, a gadget junkie, international speaker and co-author of Creating Great Teams – How Self-Selection Lets People Excel (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2015). She knows quite a lot about Agile.
Tatyana Mamut
GM & Head of Product, Amazon Web Services
Tatyana Mamut is a leader, innovator, business builder, and economic anthropologist. She is Vice President & Head of Product Experience for the Salesforce IoT Cloud, a revolutionary big data, real-time event processing platform. She also led Salesforce’s “Re-Invention” of the Sales CRM product, culminating in the “Lightning Experience.”
Prior to Salesforce, Tatyana was at IDEO, where she built and co-led the Organisation Design Practice, which partners with large complex organisations to help them become more innovative. She led many high-stakes IDEO engagements including the creation and scaling of a User-Centered Innovation Culture at Life Technologies & the Human Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit for the Gates Foundation. She has also founded two successful consulting businesses, Emergent Thinking and CS Solutions.
Tatyana has a PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley and a BA in economics from Amherst College. She also writes and speaks about technology and innovation, and the role of leadership and culture in creating and sustaining long-term competitive advantage in a rapidly-changing world.
SESSION: Cultures of innovation | Deep Dive
Sherif Mansour
Principal Product Manager, Atlassian
Sherif Mansour has 14 years of experience in software development. He is currently a Principal Product Manager for Atlassian. Over the last six years, he has been responsible for Confluence, a popular social collaboration tool for product teams. Most recently, he is now heading up the cross-product cloud experience for all of Atlassian’s products. Sherif also played a key role in developing new products at Atlassian such as Team Calendars and Confluence Questions. Areas of expertise include Agile product development. Sherif thinks building simple products is hard and so is writing a simple, short biog.
SESSION: The art of building a roadmap
Carol McEwan
Vice President of Community, Scaled Agile
Carol leads Scaled Agile’s customer success organization and together with a highly responsive support and enablement team, continuously strives to elevate the level of service and support they offer in order to provide superior quality and value to their members.
Before joining Scaled Agile, Carol was the Managing Director of Scrum Alliance. Under her leadership, membership grew from 139,000 to 400,000+, and attendance of the organization’s signature events, Global Scrum Gatherings, more than doubled in just three years. Carol started her career in Information Technology. Beginning with TD Bank as a software developer, she then honed her systems administration skills at Esso Chemical and later joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a multinational information technology services company, where she found her passion for program and project management and managed a large Program Management Office.
Some of her clients included: County of San Diego, Coors Brewing Company and Storage Technologies. Carol has a unique leadership style, which focuses on building relationships, trust and respect. She believes this is necessary to create the culture required to attract, build and maintain highly effective, collaborative teams and in-turn, successful organizations.
Kylie McKiernan
Manager, Process and Operations, Herron Todd White
Kylie McKiernan has extensive experience in the property valuation industry in all aspects such as operation management, valuation, product management, business analysis, change management and process management, on a national level as well as detailed involvement in large, complex organisational change and innovation. Using Agile and Lean methodologies, Kylie is the Product Owner of the new core application for Herron Todd White, an Australian property advisory company, and sets the vision and ensures the new application is in line with organisational goals, industry regulation, client requirements and user requirements. Kylie also forms part of the executive leadership team to deliver strategic goals set by the board, and continues to improve business processes and systems.
SESSION: (fr)agile: a retro for the implementation of an Agile mindset
Tina Mitas
Senior Legal Counsel, SMSMT
Tina Mitas is an active supporter of Agile techniques and has pioneered the creation of Agile contracts with State and Federal Government as well as the private sector. Tina’s experience in assisting to translate and align Agile concepts for her legal counterparts has been instrumental in the successful delivery of Agile contracts and the supporting governance frameworks.
SESSION: Starting on the right foot
Stuart Mitchell
Agile Coach, CBA
Stuart Mitchell is a European Agile Award Winning Coach, a founding member of the UK Banking Agile Collaboration Leadership Team, a contributory author to papers on Agile published by the UK Government, and to the UK’s National Audit Office seminal paper Agile Governance. Between 2011 and 2014 Stuart led HSBC’s Agile Transformation across 13 countries, work that involved over 150,000 staff members. He is a highly experienced Agile Coach who is driven by the aim of inspiring change through the use of Agile and DevOps across the workspace.
Stuart started working ‘hands-on’ with Agile in 2006 and has a deep well of real world ‘war stories’ from his experience to draw upon which he brings into presentations. He is passionate about Agile education (lecturing at HK University) and when not helping Agile teams reach their goals he is working with local charities and social enterprise businesses on applying Agile to have a direct benefit in the community (currently OzHarvest).
He is father of 3 grown up sons, a sporting Rugby Union Coach, a lifelong learner and currently living in Sydney, Australia.
Fabiano Morais
Delivery Coach, Envato
With 20 years of experience in software business solutions, Fabiano Morais has worked with Agile practices, both as Iteration Facilitator and Delivery Coach. He has been the leader of projects involving GIS (Geographic Information System) technology, strategic planning, project management and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). As a private consultant, Fabiano has provided expertise in Agile management, network planning and innovation methodologies. As a public speaker, he has explored various topics such as PKM (Personal Knowledge Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and social media, presenting at local and international events such as TEDx and StartUp Lab. His current research interests are the future of work and Agile methodologies, as well as visual and design thinking.
SESSION: Global nomads
Jeremy Nagel
Full Stack Developer, COzero
Jeremy Nagel is passionate about using tech to solve major societal challenges. He works at COzero where he combines his background in Environmental Science with his experience in web development to help companies reduce their power consumption. Having been burnt by many an embarrassing bug, Jeremy is rather obsessed by ways to reduce errors including checklists, static code analysis and automated tests.
SESSION: Attack of the mutants
Eric Naiburg
Marketing Director, Scrum.org
Eric Naiburg is the co-author of UML for Database Design and UML for Mere Mortals. Eric is currently responsible for all aspects of marketing at Scrum.org and previously held a similar role as director of marketing for INetU (now ViaWest). Before INetU, Eric was program director at IBM and Rational Software and was responsible for application lifecycle management (ALM), DevOps and Agile solutions Eric has held product management and marketing roles with other organisations including: Ivar Jacobson Consulting, CAST Software and Logic Works Inc. (Acquired by Platinum Technologies and CA), and as a product manager for Erwin.
SESSION: Funding Agile delivery
Cameron Newman
Director of Platform Engineering, Campaign Monitor
As the Director of Platform Engineering for a leading SaaS marketing provider, Cameron Newman is motivated by the opportunity to make people’s lives easier by creating solutions and evolving products that make a meaningful difference. With an intuitive impetus towards change and innovation, he possesses a long-standing passion for technology and unending curiosity around what’s next. Cameron enjoys challenging business-as-usual to unearth and monetise better ways of operating. Energised by fast-paced environments, he is ultimately dedicated to being the driving force behind a company’s success, managing people, technology, and costs to creating forward-looking infrastructure environments that meet commercial needs.
SESSION: Data centre migration executed under eight Lean-Agile principles
Darren Oliver
National Director, Business and Technology Solutions, Herron Todd White
Darren Oliver is an award-winning IT Leader that has overseen the evolution and revolution of technology within Herron Todd White, an Australian property valuation companies. Having moved the company to open source and cloud solutions from legacy systems, he’s been successful in transitioning the business to the new era of business technology, providing a solid innovation platform for the future. With 2 primary school-aged daughters he’s also passionate about helping educators, and education in general, prepare the next generations for a vastly different world. In his spare time he’s a serial DIY-er, enjoying building things with a hammer and nails, as well as code.
SESSION: (fr)agile: a retro for the implementation of an Agile mindset
Matt Pancino
EGM Retail & Wealth Technology for Enterprise Services, Commonwealth Bank
Matt Pancino was appointed EGM of Retail and Wealth Technology for Enterprise Services at Commonwealth Bank in September 2016. Prior to joining CBA, Matt held senior operational and technology executive roles at Suncorp, Perpetual, Telstra and Ticketek. Matt is focussed on embracing new technologies to drive innovation and service excellence for CBA’s customers.
SESSION: The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?
Leandro Pinter
Domain Delivery Lead and Agile Practice Lead, ING Direct Australia
Leandro Pinter is a Delivery guy and Coach who has been leading teams and helping organisations transition to Agile over the last 10 years. Leandro is currently heading up the Agile Practice and the Delivery function of one of the Domains at ING Direct. He is leading the integration of Design Thinking and Lean Startup concepts into ING’s way of working across the whole organisation. He has previously held various technology leadership roles in Australia and overseas and his current passion is to help organisations to change the way they work by enabling autonomy and alignment throughout the organisation.
SESSION: Transforming ING Direct Australia
Daniel Ploeg
Agile/Kanban Coach
Daniel Ploeg works as an independent contractor in Agile and Kanban Coaching based in Melbourne. He loves working with software and the teams that build it and gets a great thrill out of seeing teams improve the way they work.
Benji Portwin
Agile Coach, Spotify
Benji Portwin is an Agile Coach working with the Jam tribe within Spotify. They’re responsible for products such as Discover Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix. He’s from (South) London, but is now living in NYC with his better half Dana. He loves what he does and feels very privileged to do it. Benji learned his trade within the UK Government Digital Service, where he was lucky enough to be given a place on their fast track scheme. When he’s not at work, playing/watching sports is his thing, as well as any kind of “activity”, including going out and meeting new people.
SESSION: Coaching is for losers | Deep Dive
Invited Speaker
Dominic Price
Head of R&D and Work Futurist, Atlassian
Born in the harsh Manchester Winter of ’77, Dominic Price has a career that has reached far and wide through Europe, US and Asia PAC. Today Dom is proud to work at Atlassian, a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, as the head of R&D And Work Futurist, where his responsibilities span eight global R&D centres.
Dom was previously the general manager of program management for a global gaming company. He has also been a director at Deloitte, where he provided assurance and consulting services across the areas of project management, product management, IT systems and change management, and he’s worked across businesses in beverage, telco, manufacturing, software development and gaming.
A keen traveler, Dom has traversed over 50 countries so far, but after 13 years on these shores, he calls Australia home.
Michelle Prosser-Roberts
Release Train Engineer, AGL
Michelle Prosser-Roberts has worked in IT and business for more years than most developers have lived. Her first COBOL program (yes she is that old) was written on punched cards and she has worked in operations, application programming, project management, artificial intelligence, sales support, product marketing, IT management, project delivery, knowledge management, business architecture and finally digital development. She has found her home in Agile and more specifically as a Release Train Engineer at AGL. She is enthusiastic, energetic and can be trusted to get things done.
Simon Reason
Agile Coach, AMP
Simon Reason was introduced to Agile ways of working whilst using Scrum in 2006 and has never looked back. He discovered it as a Developer with Nokia Networks, followed by Scrum Master and coaching roles in Europe with a number of organisations such as TomTom, StatOil, and O2, amongst others. In Australia, he is currently working with AMP to support their transformation to a culture using Agile and Design Thinking. Previously he has had coaching roles with Commonwealth Bank and Bankwest.
SESSION: Getting close to customers and playing by traditional rules
Mark Richards
Partner, Context Matters
Mark Richards discovered Agile thinking 10 years into his technical career, then after 7 years as a Practitioner he moved into the world of coaching. In 2011, he switched focus from team-level Agile to Program and Enterprise agility and has been coaching and teaching in this space ever since. Working with a number of Australia’s largest organisations, he is recognised as one of the world’s leading authorities in the effective application of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
Syed Riyazuddin
Delivery Manager, Healthdirect Australia
Syed Riyazuddin is a servant-leader, a facilitator and a problem-solver, with more than 10 years of experience delivering digital solutions for banking, insurance, tax, and healthcare consumers, by creating and sustaining a culture of team autonomy, self-organisation, process automation and customer-driven design. Apart from advocating about Agile, Syed loves exploring new places and cuisines, and enjoys reading books and playing with his kids.
SESSION: Build digital services, not websites
Sarah Rose
Agile Transformation Lead, Monash University
Sarah Rose is currently leading the Agile transformation at Monash University. Leveraging the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), she has executed a number of projects that have delivered considerable value to internal and external customers: digitising forms with automated workflows, and implementing a learning management system (LMS) for graduate education.
Sarah’s next project is the Student First program, which will revolutionise student experiences through the transformation of Monash’s digital channels.
Sarah has 10 years of experience as a business analyst, and built Monash’s business analysis capability from the ground up during 2012-2014. Her extensive facilitation experience includes SAFe PI planning events, stand-ups, system demos, sprint planning and retrospectives in addition to change management initiatives such as knowledge management frameworks, lunch and learn programs and training for capacity and capability growth.
SESSION: One university’s cultural revolution to scale Agile
Scott Ross
Intermediary Domain Lead, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
Scott Ross has more than 20 years experience in financial services organisations in Australia and Europe. He has lead change in Westpac, BNP Paribas and Barclays. Currently he is a key leader in the Agile transformation team at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. Scott’s experience, enthusiasm and energy is helping the Bank to adopt agile and be more responsive to the changing demands of customers.
Invited Speaker
Katy Rowett
Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Katy Rowett is Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. Katy’s career spans over 25 years in multiple industries and across many geographies including India, Singapore, China, Uganda, Berlin and Spain. She has been an advocate and leader within the Agile movement in Australia and abroad, leading multiple organisations through major transformations and has gratefully served many people as a leader, coach and mentor. Katy has a Masters in Organisational Systems and Psychodynamics and is currently in her fifth year as a Doctoral Candidate conducting research on cultural studies within the systems psychodynamics field of study.
SESSION: The Groupishness of Groups
Gareth Rydon
Design Innovation Operations, AMP
Gareth Rydon is a versatile and innovative thinker with strong experience in Human Centred Design methodologies and tools. Gareth’s career path has seen him constantly focusing on how to make things better for people. These experiences range from working as the Executive Adviser to PwC Australia’s CEO, to customer led strategy consultant to some of Australia’s largest financial institutions.
More recently having seen the opportunity that Design Thinking could bring, Gareth pursued opportunities, through study and new roles, to understand and experience more of Human Centred Design. This lead him to his role today where he runs the operations for AMP’s Design and Innovation Team. This team represents AMP’s centre of excellence for Human Centred Design, the key objective for this team is to make AMP’s customer centred strategy real and tangible for our customers.
SESSION: Getting close to customers and playing by traditional rules
Jonny Schneider
Principal, Product Strategy and Design, ThoughtWorks
Jonny Schneider is a Practitioner, author, speaker and leader who’s fascinated by ‘why?’ and motivated by curiosity. He’s all about getting to the bottom of stuff, making sense of it, and working with good folk to solve knotty problems. He’s biased to action, leads by doing, and believes that strategy is for nought without execution. From beginnings in interface development and experience design to product management and design leadership, Jonny hones his craft in-house and as a Consultant across a range of industries, and works with small startups through to fortune 500 global organisations. He now spends most of his time consulting to senior leaders on digital product development and innovation management, and coaching product design and delivery teams to do their best work.
Marcio Sete
Principal Consultant, Elabor8
Marcio Sete is a game changer. He believes that real transformations happen through consciousness and practice. You’re likely to see Marcio discussing mindsets, principles and practices applicable to specific contexts. He’s also an enthusiast of DevOps, managing for happiness and a big believer of emergent learning practices. Marcio is a Professional Scrum Trainer, Accredited Kanban Trainer and Management 3.0 Facilitator. Marcio is helping to grow the Agile Coach Meetup in Sydney. He also frequently speaks at conferences and publishes the insights he gets observing the environments he’s inserted into. Today he helps organisations to be able to practice small and frequent changes.
SESSION: Data centre migration executed under eight Lean-Agile principles
Darren Smith
Head of Capabilities, Thoughtworks
Darren Smith is technology consultant and Head of Capabilities, having 20 years’ delivery and management experience across Australia, China, USA, India, and Canada. Darren is responsible for developing strategic capabilities across the Australian business while continuing to directly support to clients achieve their business objectives with technology at their core.
SESSION: Rise of the platforms
Carolyn Spithoven
Senior Consultant, Elabor8
Carolyn Spithoven is a Senior Consultant at Elabor8. Currently based at Monash University, for the last 12 months she has partnered with Sarah and her team on their Agile transformation journey.
Carolyn is proud to have contributed to the initial project that promoted the scaling of Agile across Monash. She currently supports a number of Agile teams as an Agile coach and is energised by the enthusiasm for Agile and growth in capability she sees around her every day.
Carolyn also worked for 12 months on a number of experiments within the innovation hub at NAB. Prior to Elabor8, Carolyn was a business analyst on one of the first Agile projects at Australia Post and a business analyst on a change management program at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
SESSION: One university’s cultural revolution to scale Agile
Invited Speaker
Pete Steel
Executive General Manager Digital, Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Commonwealth Bank is a global technology leader in financial services. As head of Digital, Pete Steel is responsible for digital strategy, customer experience, commercial performance, innovation and project delivery for the consumer lines of business – retail banking, wealth management and small business.
As part of Pete’s responsibilities, he and his team manage CommBank’s digital assets – NetBank, commbank.com.au, the CommBank app and the CommBank Property app.
The Digital@CBA team has a track record of delivering amazing experiences for five million digitally-engaged customers through 45 Agile scrum teams. Capabilities within the team include customer experience design, data-driven decision making and optimisation, FinTech partnerships, behavioural economics, platform engineering and delivery of a complex project portfolio.
Over the past 11 years working at CommBank, Pete has held various technology and business roles, most recently as CIO of the retail, wealth and business divisions, and before that as head of the CommSec wholesale business, and as an architect for the CommSec lending and online platforms.
Prior to joining CommBank, Pete held a variety of technology and business architecture roles in Australia, the United States and Europe, and co-founded a UK startup in 1995.
Michelle Stephens
Senior Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Michelle Stephens is a consultant at ThoughtWorks where she helps clients with Agile coaching, product management and technology delivery. She has spent the last 12 years helping companies with strategic, operational improvement and technology delivery projects, in both consulting and in-house corporate capacities. She strives to understand how to maximise the creation of value in organisations and looks forward to a day when Agile principles are embraced in every part of every organisation. Michelle holds a Bachelor of Laws/Bachelor of Business and a Masters of Business Administration.
SESSION: Can anyone adopt Agile?
Carolyn Trotter
Agile Coach, IBM Australia
In 2010 Carolyn was selected to be included in the first stage of an agile transformation. Since seeing the light of how transformative agile can be in the workplace she cannot be contained and uses agile everywhere (there are rumours of photos of the burndown chart for the renos).
As part of IBMs consulting business Carolyn now works with different organisations to transform the way they operate. She believes the key is to Transform through Transparency and works with teams and leaders to have the difficult, open discussions – the ones that are needed to understand how we can experiment to learn and change to improve.
Erwin van der Koogh
Founder, Bitgenics
Erwin van der Koogh is the Founder and CEO of Bitgenics, the company behind Front-end Delivery Platform Linc. He started out his career as a developer for multiple startups. After finding Scrum in 2004 he has been in every role imaginable within Scrum, developer, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Trainer and Coach.
Erwin has worked with organisations ranging from small startups to large multinational financial organisations and everything in between.
SESSION: Funding Agile delivery
Invited Speaker
Belkis Vasquez-McCall
Partner, McKinsey & Co
Belkis Vasquez-McCall is one of the pioneers of Agile thinking at McKinsey Digital Labs, focused on Agile transformation, with over 18 years of experience delivering robust solutions and coaching teams. Helping big companies innovate with the agility of small startups is Belkis’ primary mission. An expert in Agile transformation, she partners with leaders in banking, healthcare, and other sectors to unleash productivity and launch innovative products at the speed of startups. The work has taken her across North America and to Latin America, South Africa, Europe, and India.
Belkis is an experienced Agile coach and practitioner with deep knowledge in building truly Agile organisations across the globe. Taking Agile as a starting point, she expands the impact dramatically – guiding Agile at scale transformations, pursuing digital strategy development, and leading end-to-end digitisation initiatives. She likes to say that she is passionate about guiding teams out of their comfort zones so they can make a transformative leap.
Belkis is an active leader in the external Agile community, and Board member and leader in Agile New York City meetup.
SESSION: Continuous learning: Ignite the curious learner in you!
Brett Wakeman
Iteration Manager, Australia Post
Brett Wakeman first learned about Agile at carsales.com.au, after many years working in software development as a Project Manager in a waterfall environment. Having dealt with the frustrations of waterfall, this new way of working came as a breath of fresh air.
Brett is now an Iteration Manager at Australia Post and is always looking for ways to build high-performing teams, explore different Agile practices and encourage people to embrace Agile thinking.
Away from the office, Brett is a father, a ‘caving’ enthusiast and an experienced outdoor adventure instructor with the Scout Association.
SESSION: Explaining Agile at a barbie
Kylie Webb
Head of Organisational Change Management, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
Kylie Webb has gained extensive experience in change management and project management, facilitation, learning and development, stakeholder relationship management and consumer banking roles during her 20 year career with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. She is currently in a leadership role transforming the business to a new way of working; with more agility.
The key to Kylie’s success is built on her passion for great customer outcomes and new ideas. Without a doubt, her career highlight to date is the current opportunity to lead transformational change, followed closely by building and developing an internal Organisational Change Management team and capability for the organisation. Outside of work, she lives for her fabulous family, new and exciting challenges and laughs with great friends.
Amanda Wise
Experience Service Design Lead, ThoughtWorks
Amanda Wise has more than 20 years’ experience in the strategy, scoping and delivery of digital services, with the past five years focused on user research, service design and experience design. With many years in professional services at both creative and technical agencies, Amanda brings deep delivery and marketing know-how to the UX process. She is a skilled workshop facilitator, leading client and design teams to innovate through understanding the user and rapid prototyping. Amanda is focused on delivering authentic and useful experiences that spark conversations for users, and conversion for business. Clients include the ABC, St George Bank, Australian Federal Government, The Economist, Foxsports, NewLine Cinema, and many others.
Richard Young
Program Director, Bankwest
Richard Young is Business Owner for the new Home Owner experience and is part of the Customer Transformation programme at Bankwest. Richard is a passionate exponent for Design Thinking and customer centric design as the future of product design in traditional Australian institutions. He has spent the last 15 years leading large scale application design and implementation projects over a range of industries. Most recently, Richard has brought Agile tools, techniques and culture to a range of programs, and loves experimenting with how to make this work at scale across the enterprise as part of an organisation’s Agile transformation journey.
SESSION: Deep customer research…fast