Philip Abernathy | Agile Professional Development Lead, Suncorp (Australia)
In his current role as Agile Professional Development Lead in Suncorp, Philip Abernathy has 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 guided numerous organisations in the use of Agile and Lean based ways of working to help them deliver business value faster.
Philip has 29 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 Agile and offshoring, Agile and Legacy and Agile Governance and Lean Leadership.
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Adam Boas | Principal Engineer, Aconex
Adam Boas is a Principal Engineer at Aconex, leading development in the new product space. He has a long history in software delivery as a developer, tech lead, architect and manager.
Adam has delivered bespoke development projects and new products in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, logistics, government, mining, and resources. He is a team builder, a coach and a delivery enabler but above all a developer with a low level understanding of the problems development teams face when approaching the sharp end of a delivery.
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Nigel Dalton | Deputy Director, Digital, Lonely Planet
For Nigel Dalton, the Agile road to Damascus was Flight QF73 to San Francisco in early 2000. Fleeing the Y2K-obsessed development organisation at AXA Australia for the promise of Po Bronson's Nudist on the Late Shift, he read XP Explained on the plane, and never looked back. Agile software development was a key part of the success of that start-up (ePredix, later bought by Previsor). Use of the approach spread to product development and client implementations, with varying levels of success. In 2007, Nigel joined Lonely Planet. In the wreckage of a 24 month ERP/ CMS/ Web project delivery (so waterfall the PMO governance meetings were known as the Nuremberg Trials), the seeds of an Agile IT organisation, coupled with an ITIL-focused operations team were planted. Now under BBCW ownership, Agile is a well ingrained habit, with product development, legal, SAPS, IT Ops, Finance and HR using aspects of Scrum and Kanban, and the engineering group implementing a Devops model.
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Keith Dodds | Director, Client Relations, ThoughtWorks Asia Pacific
Keith Dodds is responsible for ThoughtWorks' client relations, sales and marketing in the Asia Pacific region. Keith has over 25 years experience in consulting, story-telling and general rabble-rousing. He has worked across the US, the UK and for over 17 years in Australia. Keith prefers informed conversations with clients and prospective customers about the likely outcomes of their behaviour and decisions, both rational and unintended, emerging industry trends and new management imperatives.
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Martin Kearns | Agile Practice Lead, Renewtek
Martin Kearns is the National Capability Lead for agile services in SMS, an experienced technology professional with 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. Martin 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 ( Co-Author of the CSC Whitepaper, part of the coaching board for the scrum alliance, 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 begun).
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Craig Smith | Delivery Coach, Suncorp
Craig Smith has been a software developer for over 15 years, specialising in a large number of technologies in that time. He has been an Agile practitioner for the last eight years, 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, fulfilling technical lead, iteration manager and Agile coaching roles on technology and business projects. He has presented at many international conferences including Agile 2008, Agile 2009, Atlassian Summit 2010 and the Australian Software Engineering Conference. He was also the lead reviewer and technical proof-reader on the recently released book from Manning Publications called "Becoming Agile".
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Dave Thomas | Founder and Chairman, Bedarra
Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.
He has many years of experience in structured documents including the design of laser printer controllers, early commercial applications of Tex. He has advised on the IBM B2B strategy, and is on the MS Customer Advisory Council and with OLL contributed to the SCORM elearning standard, and authoring tools. He is Chairman of Xia Systems, Online-Learning.com (OLL), and a director of Stilo/Omnimark, Bitflash, Amikanow and Synop and several other software companies.
Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company.
He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular the Java tooling.
Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.
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