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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Richard Banks | Principal Consultant, Readify
Richard Banks has developed software for the last 18 years for a wide range of industries and development platforms and over the years and has filled many roles including developer, team lead, project manager and CIO/CTO. He is a professional Scrum Master Trainer and professional Scrum Developer Trainer, runs the Sydney Alt.Net user group and the Talking Shop Down Under podcast, owns and contributes to a few open source projects and has spoken at Microsoft Tech.Ed and a number of other events and user groups around the country. For some strange reason he gets a real kick out of helping development teams to improve and produce great software. If you want to get in touch he tweets at @rbanks54 and blogs at www.richard-banks.org. He currently works as a Principal Consultant for Readify and is a Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP.
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Simon Bennett | Principal Coach and Trainer, Scrum withStyle
Simon has been delivering Software Projects ranging from multiple million dollar simulator programmes through to hosted web applications across Australia, Asia, the middle east, USA and Europe. The last 12+ years have been focused on delivering solutions using Agile & Lean Principles & methods. After moving to the UK, Simon worked as project manager in online gaming before taking a position as a CTO in the Finance Sector where he successfully ran on and offshore development using XP & Scrum.
Simon is well known on the international conference circuit having spoken multiple times at Agile 20xx, Scrum Gatherings & the Microsoft PDC.
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Sally Bieleny | User Experience Lead, Object Consulting
Sally Bieleny leads the User Experience team at Object Consulting. She is fascinated by people and the way they interact with technology. She has been involved in designing websites, web applications and intranets. More recently multi-touch interactions for Microsoft Surface, multi-touch screens, mobile phones, and tablets like the iPad are stretching her design capabilities in new directions.
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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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Evan Bottcher | Sanitation Engineer, 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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Simon Bristow | Senior Project Manager, SEEK
Simon Bristow has hosted, chaired and spoken at numerous Agile related user groups and conferences in Melbourne.
He was accountable for the Agile transition at Aconex, and now at SEEK as Senior Project Manager, Simon will be playing a key role in the company's 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 Portals and Online Services, NBN Co
Michael Bromley has been working in the online and mobile technology industry for more than 14 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 U.S.
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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Tania Broome | Agile Practice Manager, BankWest
Tania Broome leads Bankwest's Agile Coaching team as they grow the Agile capability across the bank. A year into Bankwest's Agile Transformation Programme, Tania is thrilled with the progress made, the obstacles already overcome, and the wonderful cultural transformation that is taking place.
Having experienced the vibrant Agile centres of Europe and the United States over the past few years, Tania is excited to be a part of the blossoming Agile community in Perth, Western Australia.
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Neil Bryden | Senior Consultant, DiUS Computing
Neil Bryden has 15 years experience in innovation, product architecture and technology consulting in areas including communications, consumer products, and more recently Smart Grids and Electric Vehicle infrastructure. As a relative newcomer to Agile practices, Neil has integrated his cross-discipline experience in hardware and mechanical engineering with Agile software development techniques to bring Agile to embedded systems engineering.
Neil has worked as a technology consultant with DiUS Computing for 2 years and holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering from RMIT University.
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Rowan Bunning | Principal Consultant and Trainer, Scrum WithStyle
Rowan Bunning is a pioneer of Scrum in Australia. With a background in web and object-oriented software design, Rowan was first introduced to Agile as "the way good smalltalkers develop software". Rowan became Australia's first Certified Scrum Practitioner and Certified Scrum Trainer. He has built extensive experience training, coaching and leading Agile adoptions across Australia, New Zealand, the U.K, and Ireland and has worked as an Agile Coach and ScrumMaster at one of Europe's leading Agile consultancies.
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Philip Chan | Senior Development Manager, IBM
Philip Chan joined IBM in 2003 as the Product Architect for IBM Lotus Web Content Management in the WebSphere Portal group. In his roles as Architect, Development Manager and Test Manager, Philip has led the transformation towards a value-based Agile process.
Prior to joining IBM, Philip was Lead Engineer at Tenzing Communications, where he co-invented the world's first in-flight email and passenger communications system and created one of the first Agile teams in the avionics industry.
Philip has a passion for crafting outstanding software and software development teams that delight their customers.
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David Chatterton | Chief Technology Officer, Aconex
David Chatterton was promoted to Chief Technology Officer at Aconex in July 2008 and soon after instigated and led the adoption of Scrum. He has fostered an environment at Aconex that has now embraced many aspects of Agile including Lean, Kanban and XP and seen Agile practices spread to others parts of the business. Previously David managed engineering teams developing performance monitoring tools, trusted operating systems and clustered file systems at Silicon Graphics. David has a PhD in Computer Science.
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Marina Chiovetti | Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Marina Chiovetti is a Principal Consultant who helps organisations transform their software projects by focusing on the human aspects of technology. Her work reflects a particular interest in project-team enablement through iterative development techniques while putting a spotlight on users and their interactions. With over ten years of industry practice, Marina has spent the last three years working as an Agile Coach on large-scale rollouts. She actively shares learnings and experience from working in a distributed corporate Change Program and coaching teams as they embark on an enterprise Agile journey.
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Jonathan Coleman | Iteration Manager, Suncorp
Jonathan Coleman is an Agile enthusiast at Suncorp. Jonathan's journey has included many and varied roles, from large scale systems integration, to small in-house development projects, to BAU maintenance, to rolling out massive systems consolidation projects. Jonathan has worked as a consultant, for himself, and as a permanent staff member for large corporates.
Jonathan began to see the light in 2006 when Agile and Scrum were introduced to him. He took some of these concepts into managing a small pseudo-IT team within the business, and really got it humming. The next steps came in managing delivery on large projects, working closely with coaches such as Craig Smith (Suncorp), Kane Mar, and James Brett (ThoughtWorks).
Jonathan is also an active and dedicated father, volunteers in scouting, marriage coaching and finance workshops, and runs a blog which addresses the deeper issues in life, love and child raising!
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Steve Coles | Chief Information Officer, Allianz
Steve Coles has been Allianz Chief Information Officer since 2005 and has spent most of his career in the insurance industry. He has responsibility for all aspects of IT for Allianz in Australia and New Zealand.
In 2010 he extended his responsibilities to include Business Improvement. He previously spent nearly nine years with the Marsh Group of Companies including roles of Managing Director, eBusiness & Transformation and IT Director. Prior to this he worked as a consultant specialising in IT strategy and business process re-engineering within insurance.
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Sandra Dalli | Agile Coach, BankWest
Sandra Dalli is actively and passionately involved in coaching Bankwest business as usual (BAU) teams through their adoption of Agile values and practices in their everyday ways of working. Ask Sandra about the great successes they are seeing in their "Grassroots" program as Agile finds its way into Bankwest support teams and the great value it is providing individuals, teams and customers.
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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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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 popular residential and commercial real estate websites. The company has operations on three continents.
Previously, as a Principal Consultant for ThoughtWorks, Richard helped ThoughtWork's clients to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their IT divisions by applying Lean and Agile techniques to their businesses.
Richard spent a number of years working in the Manufacturing & Supply Chain Systems Division of Ford Motor Company, working with a global team to introduce 'Lean' principles to the manufacturing plants and re-align the IT systems to the new processes. Richard was lucky enough to work with a number of Lean experts, some ex-Toyota, and has been applying this knowledge in the IT domain for the last five years.
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.
Richard is a certified 6-Sigma practitioner and a chartered member of the British Computer Society.
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Patrick Eltridge | Chief Information Officer, Telstra
Patrick Eltridge joined Telstra as the Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of 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 has 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, particularly in the online space. Patrick's focus has been on embedding and aligning IT delivery more closely with business teams, fast growth, team building, and rapid time to value.
Previous roles include employment at Standard Chartered Bank with responsibility for strategy, architecture and design first for consumer banking and then as Group Chief Architect, from 2008 - 2010. Prior to that Patrick had four years as the CIO for Business and Consumer Banking at Westpac, four years as CIO at Seek as well as time spent as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group.
Patrick holds a Bachelor of Mathematics (Comp. Sci.), is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, an Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a Senior Associate of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.
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Neal Ford | Software Architect, ThoughtWorks
Neal Ford is a Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks.
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Stephen Hardisty | Technical Lead, REA Group
Stephen Hardisty has been working as a software developer for 12 years with roles in companies such as Logica, Symantec and, more recently, as a Technical Lead at REA Group's realestate.com.au. In this time he has acted as a BA, developer, coach, team lead and tight-rope walker attempting to balance the needs of delivery against the need to create maintainable software.
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Beverley Head | Freelance journalist
Beverley Head began writing about the business of technology in London in 1983. After moving to Australia in 1987 she became the IT editor of the Australian Financial Review, taking the once weekly section daily, before becoming the newspaper's features editor. Now a freelance writer she continues to focus on business and technology and has written for a wide range of publications including The Age, BRW, Boss, Campus Review, Information Age, iTWire and The Sydney Morning Herald. In 2004 she was awarded the Kester Cranswick lifetime achievement award for her work as an IT journalist.
Beverley, who was born in the North of England , holds a Bachelor of Arts in Metallurgy and the Science of Materials from Oxford University and a deep affection for good red wine.
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Lorena Healey | HR Manager, SEEK
Lorena Healey is the HR Manager for SEEK Limited, Australia and New Zealand's number one destination for jobs and careers. Lorena and her team of HR generalists and learning and development consultants create initiatives to attract, develop, retain and engage talented employees, who contribute to making SEEK an employer of choice.
Commencing her career as an accountant, Lorena worked in recruitment prior to transitioning to HR, and has since spent time designing and executing strategies for talent management, performance management and learning and development.
Lorena maintains a primary focus on engagement by creating initiatives that ensure SEEK is regarded as a place where people want to work, and grow their careers.
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Jacky Jacob | Supervising Consultant, Object Consulting
Jacky Jacob has worked in the consulting arena for over 17 years as a consultant, and more recently as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. Working across a wide range of organisations she has seen how an Agile project can provide positive benefits. Jacky is an advocate for change where it can be seen to add value and has been coaching teams to continually look for "better practice" as there is no such thing as best practice.
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Steve Jenkins | Iteration Manager, Suncorp
Steve Jenkins is an active "Agile-Evangelist" with a particular interest in issues affecting Iteration Managers. He has been intrinsic in the recent delivery of two of Suncorp's largest software development projects. These being the rationalisation to a single insurance claims system for all Suncorp brands and the creation of one customer view for the Suncorp Group. Now as the Iteration Manager for the Banking Platform Project he is tasked with the goal of upgrading the CRM system for the bank. Since joining Suncorp, Steve has worked as an Analyst, Tester, Iteration Manager and Team Leader. He enjoys motivating the team and believes in leading by example.
At the 20th Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2009), he presented "Failing at Iteration Management" discussing common and reoccurring mistakes in "Agile" projects. This topic encouraged participants to take away skills that enabled them to be better equipped when they embark on new projects and identify potential failings in current projects. The feedback to this topic was encouraging.
At the Agile Australia 2011 Conference, Steve will discuss the controversial topic of the relationship between the roles of Iteration Manager and Team Leader. His "Lightning Talk" will aim to unravel the "grey areas" where these Agile leadership roles overlap and question who should handle the difficult conversations in self managing teams. A topic that's sure to spark debate!
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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 startup from inception to launch. More recently David has 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. He recently received the Lean SSC Brickell Key award for outstanding achievement and leadership.
His Lean and Kanban blog is at http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com.
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Martin Kearns | National Capability Lead, SMS MT
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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Paul King | Director, ASERT
Paul King leads ASERT, an organisation based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.
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Craig Langenfeld | Product Ambassador, Rally Software
Craig Langenfeld is a Product Ambassador for Rally Software in Boulder, CO. Since 2000, Craig has held such titles as developer, project manager, instructor, scrummaster, tool expert, and friend to those who are driving organizational change and seeking better ways to deliver software. Recently he has focused his efforts on building a community and sharing best practices for Agile software development within High Assurance industries. He is also passionate about scaling Agile practices and tooling within large enterprises. Craig earned his bachelors degree from Northern Iowa University and currently holds PMP and CSM certifications.
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Steve Lawrence | Agile Consultant, Slice Consulting
Steve Lawrence is a very experienced Agile consultant with over six years as an Agile practitioner, coach and trainer. Steve believes strongly in the power of collaboration through facilitation and taking a pragmatic and logical approach that will enable successful project delivery. He is a strong advocate of the need to align Agile project management with Agile delivery, and that Agile is a toolbox with different tools and techniques that different organisations and teams can adapt to suit their needs and specific requirements. To that end he believes you can apply different Agile practices to any project.
Steve has presented at the PMI Australia conference, and at the IBM Solutions for success showcase. He was involved with the panel discussions on Flavours of Agile at last year's conference and regularly presents to and trains corporate executives and delivery teams.
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Nish Mahanty | Software Delivery Manager, MYOB
Dr Nish Mahanty is 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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Sarah McAllister | Agile Coach, BankWest
Sarah McAllister is passionate about the people aspects of Agile, helping teams as they bond and grow together over the course of a project. Speak to Sarah about how Bankwest is building its internal Agile training program for new teams embarking on Agile projects for the first time.
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Kane Mar | President, Scrumology
Kane Mar has been developing, coaching and leading software projects for the last 20 years. He has been an active member of the Agile software development community since 2001, when he first had the opportunity of working with Ken Schwaber. Kane has training and coached software teams throughout North America and Northern Europe.
Kane was the founder of the very first Scrum Users group in Seattle, WA and has been active in the Agile community for the last 10 years. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and has spoken at Agile Australia, Scrum Gatherings and QCon.
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Nicholas Muldoon | Product Manager, Atlassian
Nicholas Muldoon is a product manager with Australian software company Atlassian. At present Nicholas is responsible for GreenHopper, an Agile planning product with over 10,000 customers globally.
Prior to product management Nicholas was involved in growing Atlassian's pre-sales team globally. His focus was on introducing and enhancing opportunities for customer self-service through automation. This provided customers with timely answers and kept costs extremely low, giving Atlassian an advantage in the cost of sales.
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Dean Netherton | Senior Consultant, DiUS Computing
Dean Netherton has over 20 years experience working in engineering, architecture and leading roles across a variety of technologies, methodologies, clients and business domains.
Dean is passionate about Agile and has been instrumental in the implementation and adoption of Agile processes and Agile coaching for many teams, individuals and organisations. He is active in the Agile community and stays across the latest ideas, trends and developments in the agile world and in turn, is a great believer in finding ways to work smart, and to be efficient and effective in the delivery of a quality product to the business.
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Jane Nguyen | Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Jane Nguyen has 12 years of process improvement and organisational change experience in a diverse range of industries including telecommunications and financial services. Favouring Agile and Lean principles, Jane works with organisations in building effective and empowered teams to innovate and deliver more efficiently. Jane strives for a one team attitude and continues to help organisations break down the perceptions and barriers that stand between Business and IT.
Jane is a Consultant at ThoughtWorks helping clients on a daily basis with skills ranging from Agile coaching through to implementation and delivery.
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Daniel Oertli | Chief Information Officer, REA Group
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).
He is passionate about leading positive, profitable change in forward-thinking enterprises.
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.
Daniel's change philosophy is centred around developing high-performance cultures - with a focus on energising teams, pushing boundaries and nurturing inclusive leadership models, to create sustainable advantage for employees and the enterprise alike.
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Rebecca Parsons | Chief Technology Officer, ThoughtWorks
Dr Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 20 years application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. Rebecca has published in both language and artificial intelligence publications, served on numerous program committees, and reviews for several journals. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems.
Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimisation, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as Director's Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.
Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.
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Lorraine Pauls Longhurst | Managing Director, LPL Software Consulting
Lorraine Pauls Longhurst is a seasoned Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Master with over five years of Agile experience and over ten years of experience managing software development / implementation projects. Lorraine is a thought leader in the Agile community and has published a number of articles on the adoption of Scrum / Agile in CIO Magazine, ComputerWorld and the Agile Journal. She has presented on the topic at a number of venues including the Australian Computer Society and the Agile Meetup.
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Fabio Pereira | Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Fabio Pereira is a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks. Over the last 10 years, he has been helping organisations achieve their objectives fulfilling Technical Lead, Application Architect, Agile Coach and various other roles.
Prior to ThoughtWorks, Fabio was a pioneer agilist and entrepreneur in Brazil. He is particularly passionate about human psychology and, as a facillitator/coach/team lead, he believes that understanding what motivates people to work together, achieve similar goals and what drives our decision making process can ultimately be extremely helpful for the success of a team.
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James Pierce | Director of Engineering, Lonely Planet
James Pierce is a passionate leader of software teams and IT organisations and has been using Agile practices for longer than he knew Agile was the right name to use. A generalist, James has a wide range of experience gained from time working in experimental physics labs, startups like Aconex and RedBubble as well as big business like Ericsson. This diverse background makes James deeply interested in the question of WHY things are the way they are. He's also fascinated by what drives individuals, what makes a sustainable high performance team and how to build great software along the way.
Currently the Director of Engineering at Lonely Planet, in the past he's held CIO/CTO roles at the New Zealand Exchange, Aconex and CLEAR Interactive as well as engineering roles at Melbourne University and Ericsson.
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Tony Ponton | Delivery Coach, Agile Academy
Tony Ponton has been a tester, developer and BA primarily delivering online applications for the past 15 years and an Agile practitioner for the past seven years. He is also a Certified Scrum Master, Workplace Trainer and is currently working within the Agile Academy as Subject Matter Expert and Agile Coach. He has co-authored and presented papers for the Communications Policy & Research Forum Sydney 2009 and is an active member of the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre.
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Sascha Ragtschaa | Senior Development Manager, Computershare
Sascha Ragtschaa, IT Manager for Global Applications in Computershare Technology Services is responsible for Computershare's business process outsourcing solutions and multi-channel communication services globally. His area of accountability encompasses global software and product development, systems and team integration, as well as business strategy and technology direction.
Sascha joined Computershare through an acquisition in Germany in 2004, where he managed all Computershare's Regional IT Services for Continental Europe. Over the course of the years he has led many enterprise software and rapid delivery projects in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. A German native from Munich, he moved to Computershare's Global Headquarters in Melbourne in 2008.
Prior to joining Computershare, Sascha worked as a Senior Software Engineer and IT Manager at various German financial and data services providers. His past work involved data analytics and reporting, campaign management and electronic communication, shareholder management and employee plans products, annual general meeting solutions, online products and streaming technology.
Sascha started his IT career at 17 years of age as a software developer working on numerous open source projects in Germany and has been an Agile advocate for the last 15 years of his IT career, bridging the gap between corporate structures, core product development and rapid software delivery. Following Agile practices and principles across project management and software development allowed him to ensure the IT teams focus on business benefits first, while maintaining maximum transparency and continuously delivering against business goals and strategies.
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Michael Rembach | Applications Development Manager, Transport NSW
Michael Rembach is an experienced strategic IT manager and Agile evangelist. He has worked as a manager and developer in a range of industries including financial services, medical computing and the public service. He is currently an applications development manager an in this capacity has introduced Agile to a large public service organisation. He is continuing to improve the transition to Agile and educating himself and the team in Agile.
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Lynn Shrewsbury | Iteration Manager, Solnet Solutions (Australia)
Lynn Shrewsbury has been gaining experience with using Agile for a number of years, working across IT Governance, application development and support, Lynn tries to balance her passion for Agile with an approach that places the emphasis on the team rather than ticking the practice boxes.
Having worked with IT teams for her whole career, Lynn Shrewsbury felt that the time was ripe for a new challenge - to use those valuable Agile and coaching experiences with a non-IT project team. Lynn's lightning talk will explore some of the challenges she met on this journey, and share some insights she has had along the way.
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Fiona Siseman | Agile Project Manager, Lonely Planet
Fiona Siseman works at Lonely Planet in Melbourne as a Project Manager on Agile teams. She is currently working as part of the Lonely Planet Operating System program 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! Fiona blogs at agileboardhacks.com.
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Adrian Smith | Director of Technology, Ennova
Dr Adrian Smith is a software engineering and technology consultant who specialises in Agile and Lean methods. His experience spans a variety of industries that include mining, aerospace, public infrastructure, digital media, banking and insurance. Adrian has led and coached engineering and software development teams for organisations that include Airbus, GKN Aerospace, BBC Worldwide and Suncorp. Adrian is currently the Director of Technology for Ennova - a Startup company that is focused on construction and engineering. Adrian also works as an Agile coach for Suncorp and shares his experiences online at AgileEngineeringDesign.com.
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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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Jeff Smith | CEO, Suncorp Business Services, Suncorp
Jeff Smith is Chief Executive Officer, Suncorp Business Services and is responsible for the Group's technology, real estate, group procurement and HR services portfolios. He was originally appointed to the role of Group Executive, Business Technology following Suncorp's merger with Promina in 2007. Jeff has 22 years experience in the IT industry, with the last 12 years spent as chief information officer or equivalent for a range of companies in the USA and Australia. He was previously CIO for Telstra Corporation, where he led the transformation and integration of that company's IT systems, and has also held leadership positions in a number of world class companies including Honeywell, Toyota and Charles Schwab.
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Lawrence Song | Technical Architect, MYOB
During the day Lawrence Song is a technical architect at MYOB, where he has recently been involved in migrating a 10 year-old legacy system to new architecture and assisting the team to implement a continuous delivery strategy.
Previously a consultant at ThoughtWorks, Lawrence has experience in the creation of enterprise-class, scalable multi-tier applications and architecture using a variety of different technologies. He specialises in building continuous integration environments and testing frameworks. Lawrence is continually learning new languages and technologies, and his current passions are Ruby on Rails and Continuous Delivery.
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Alexandra Stokes | Solutions Delivery Manager, Insuranceline
Alexandra Stokes is an IT leader who is interested in building high performing IT teams and leveraging IT capabilities. Alex works with business leaders to facilitate good returns on their IT and software spend. She is a believer in using Agile techniques and principles to prioritise work; maximising business value, in concert with immersion in the business domain. Alexandra has recently been responsible for the Insuranceline's transformation to Agile as the head of the internal software delivery department of 45 IT professionals. She has built an Agile capability and transitioned their eight streams of development to Agile.
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John Sullivan | Head of Technology New Business Development, Jetstar
John Sullivan is responsible for the formation of new IT solutions and delivery teams, for new business development at the Jetstar group. Using over 20+ years IT experience he specialises in the formation of teams utilising Agile delivery techniques to build and deliver time to market business aligned systems. He has worked in multiple industries like travel, sales and marketing, banking, insurance, health, consulting, government and defence. He has transformed, built and managed Agile delivery teams varying in size from small to 150+ people.
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Dave Thomas | Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bedarra
Dave Thomas is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. The recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.
Dave 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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Nicholas Thorpe | Agile Programme Manger, Lonely Planet
Nicholas Thorpe is Agile Programme Manager and Senior Agile Coach at Lonely Planet, Melbourne. With Bruce Taylor, he introduced Agile at Lonely Planet four years ago. Nick now has two roles.
One is as the Agile Programme Manager of a large programme of work designed to revolutionise the way Lonely Planet collects, manages and productises its information. This programme is called the LP Operating System, and encompasses three separate streams of work.
The second is as a Senior Agile Coach, where Nick works with teams across the whole enterprise - either to transition to an Agile way of working, or to assist a team in diagnosing and solving problems. Lonely Planet is unique in that it has adopted Agile practices right across the enterprise - not just for software delivery, but in legal, operations, publishing and other departments. Nick has led this adoption and worked with each team as they transition to this new way of working. This is now the dominant style of work at Lonely Planet.
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Andy Trigg | Senior Software Engineer, Aconex
Andy Trigg is a Senior Software Engineer and Agile Coach at Aconex. In the past he was the Co-founder of Gigantiq, an Agile consultancy, and has extensive experience as a Melbourne based Agile Consultant, Agile coach, trainer and facilitator.
Andy has more than sixteen years of experience in the IT industry and has spent the past eight years heavily focused at applying and introducing Agile methods into a number of organisations of various sizes.
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Francisco Trindade | Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Francisco Trindade works as developer, coach and consultant at ThoughtWorks.
After working on his own start up, Francisco has been helping several companies in the telecommunications, media and finance industries to improve their processes and deliver successful software projects.
Having worked with different types of projects in the past years, both in the UK and Australia, Francisco's interests range from technology and development to systems thinking and how to create performing teams and organisations.
He has presented about Agile and lean in various conferences, including Agile US, Xp Europe, Agile Brazil and South-American Agiles.
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Renee Troughton | Delivery Coach, Suncorp
Renee Troughton is an Agile Coach with over 14 years of experience in software development, coaching and organisational change. Specialising in large scale adoption, Renee has spent seven 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 currently works for Suncorp Australia as an Agile Coach applying techniques from Scrum, XP, Kanban and Lean into non-software development domains.
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Tomas Varsavsky | Delivery Manager, REA Group
Tomas Varsavsky had 'Software Engineer' stamped on his forehead at birth. He wrote his first computer program in BASIC at the age seven and he's been involved in software ever since. After completing a Computer Engineering and Computer Science degree at The University Of Melbourne in 1999 he joined Ericsson as a graduate where he gained a deep appreciation for large scale real time software systems. In 2006 he joined ThoughtWorks and spent the next five years helping various organisations solve their software problems. In 2010 Tomas joined REA Group as a delivery manager where he currently directs multiple delivery teams that build and maintain the customer facing systems. Tomas has had great success using Agile as a vehicle for building high performance delivery teams that collaborate closely with the business to deliver great outcomes.
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John Viner | Application Development Manager, PlayUp
John Viner is currently the Application Development Manager at PlayUp, a company building mobile-based games driven from live sporting events.
Before joining PlayUp, he was the Software Development Manager at Lonely Planet, where he grew the software development capability from a single Agile website team to five teams across many parts of the business.
In more recent times he has had a keen interest in the DevOPS movement and how Agile approaches can help in improving the efficiency of taking completed code to production on a continuous basis.
John has had 18 years of experience in the software industry having worked in the USA, UK and Australia as a Developer, DBA, Systems Administrator, Architect and now Development Manager. He believes that building software is always more about getting people and teams communicating well over and above the technology they choose, a philosophy at the heart of the Agile movement.
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