Stream Chairs + Reviewers

KIM BALLESTRIN | Agile Engagement Lead, Telstra

Stream: Approaches

Kim Ballestrin has been an Agile engagement lead in Telstra IT for the last three years, from the beginning of the Telstra IT Agile change journey. Her focus has been on the initial part of the delivery process and finding ways to improve collaboration from the very start of an idea, through to the formation of Agile teams. Kim is the organiser of the Melbourne Cynefin Meetup group and is interested in finding new ideas that can help improve the ways that we work. Prior to the Agile role, her first 15 years at Telstra were spent in roles from telemarketing to marketing analysis, IT business analyst, program manager and delivery centre manager. Kim has a BSc. in Biology and worked for five years in the media industry before joining Telstra.

CHRIS CHAN | Agile Coach and Supervising Consultant, Object Consulting

Stream: Approaches

Chris Chan is an Agile Coach with Object Consulting with over 15 years experience in software development who cares about humanising the workplace.

He specialises in scaling Agile and helping executives, teams and individuals to adopt Agile values, principles and practices that thrive within their specific environment.

Chris is the organiser of the Melbourne Agile Coaching Circles Meetup group and his passion is working side-by-side with teams to help them become more effective and deliver value to customers and the business. He has a particular interest in coaching organisations and teams to bring about positive change to build learning organisations. His ethos is to be pragmatic, listen and apply incremental learning. In his spare time Chris likes to spend time behind the camera and enjoys a game of golf.

RENEE TROUGHTON | Co-Host, The Agile Revolution; Founder, Unbound DNA

Stream: Approaches

Renee Troughton is an Agile Coach with over 15 years of experience in software development, coaching and organisational change. Specialising in large scale adoption, Renee has spent nine years working with teams and organisations applying a variety of implementation models including undercover evangelists to broad reaching, cross government department governance changes. A Certified Scrum Master, Renee applies techniques from Scrum, XP, Kanban and Lean into non-software development domains.

SCOTT SHAW | Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks

Stream: Delivery

Scott Shaw is the Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks in Australia where he helps to foster and share technical innovation across a broad spectrum of projects. For more than 15 years, Scott has been a developer, architect, and consultant to business, government and nonprofit organisations. He helps organisations shape pragmatic IT strategies while maintaining the highest possible technical quality. Scott has a particular interest in offshore and distributed delivery and travels frequently to mentor technical leaders in India and China. He has a wide-ranging passion for all things technical, and his current interests include microserivce architectures and the Clojure programming language.

JOHN SMART | Chief Executive Officer, Wakaleo

Stream: Delivery

John Smart is the Chief Executive Officer of Wakaleo Consulting, a company that provides consulting, training, mentoring and testing services in Enterprise Java and Agile requirements analysis, development and testing practices. A long-time advocate of open source tools that support and automate the software development lifecycle, John is the author of Java Power Tools and Jenkins: The Definitive Guide, as well as an active contributor to several open source projects. John is also the founder and lead developer of the Thucydides project, a new open source library that helps teams writing web-based automated acceptance tests (ATDD) using WebDriver/Selenium 2 in conjunction with BDD tools like easyb and JBehave.

ADRIAN SMITH | Founder and Head of Technology, Ennova

Stream: Delivery

Dr. Adrian Smith is an engineer who is passionate about technology and helping to increase productivity and quality using Agile and Lean principles. Although he is an entrepreneur at heart, Adrian has worked for organisations like Airbus, BBC, GKN and Suncorp where he has led teams developing products for the aerospace, digital media and construction industries. Adrian's passion for creativity and innovation flows through his work and is at the core of the culture he has created at Ennova, the startup technology company he founded in 2008.

TOM SULSTON | Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Stream: Delivery

Tom Sulston works for ThoughtWorks in London as a consultant in the build and release space and loves the whole DevOps thing. He has previously spoken at Agile and XP conferences on continuous integration tools and build pipeline practices.

LACHLAN HEASMAN | Agile Coach

Stream: Individuals and Interactions

Lachlan Heasman is an independent coach and trainer. He has wide experience and knowledge from working on several major and many small Agile change programs in Australia. He also has all the requisite certifications to boot. He has deep experience in all facets of Agile practice but in the interest of quality leaves the development work to people who do it well. Lachlan has a Masters in Coaching Psychology from the University of Sydney which gives Lachlan a unique (and often annoying) perspective on coaching, leadership and change in the Agile community (which he often shares without being asked). His industry experience includes retail and online banking, insurance, telecoms, media, retail, legal and government.

DIPESH PALA | Agile Capability Lead, IBM

Stream: Individuals and Interactions

As an Agile Capability Lead, Dipesh Pala pursues his passion for helping organisations of all sizes to incrementally adopt the benefits of Agile practices. He has a long history in software delivery having worked within a variety of industries as a programmer, business systems analyst, iteration manager and project manager. Over the last five years, Dipesh has helped many project teams as an on-the-ground Agile consultant and mentor. He has been instrumental in rolling out Agile methods in many organisations and is currently coaching and mentoring aspiring iteration managers, Agile project managers and team leaders to become the Agile practitioners their teams need. A keen advocate of simplicity, Dipesh offers simple, practical yet powerful ways to address the challenges team members and managers in Agile environments face today. He continuously pushes individuals and teams beyond the practices and principles to take a step further into the Agile journey.

STEVE LAWRENCE | Lead Agile Coach, Rally Software

Stream: Measure & Learn

After 19 years in the IT area, nine years using Agile techniques, five years as a leading Agile coach and practitioner to two of Australasia's largest Agile transformations (Suncorp & Telstra) as well as a large number of different organisations across Australia and New Zealand, Steve remains an Agile pragmatist at heart.

He strongly believes Agile is a toolbox with a set of tools to be selected and adapted as necessary to deliver optimum value.

He is very focused on delivering greater value to customers - value in terms of strategic leadership and assisting organisations to become more efficient and effective. Steve sees Agile is an excellent framework for accomplishing this.

Steve is now the Lead Agile Coach for Rally Software across Asia Pacific where he coaches and advises customers on Agile best Practice and how to continue to evolve on their Agile journey's.

SHOAIB SHAUKAT | Iteration Manager, REA Group

Stream: Measure & Learn

Shoaib Shaukat is an Iteration Manager at REA Group where he works with Agile Product teams and is responsible for delivering projects and leading engineering teams. Over last two years Shoaib has built several high-performing Agile teams and delivered several key projects for REA Group. With 14 years of experience in IT as a software engineer and manager, Shoaib has spent last eight years working with Agile teams at REA Group, Sensis and Owens Illinois. Shoaib is acutely aware that Innovation is the only recipe for long term survival and growth of the businesses and he is curious about finding ways to design and build innovative enterprises. Shoaib has an MBA in Innovation and Strategy from Melbourne Business School and an undergraduate in computer science.

NISH MAHANTY | Program Manager, RMIT

Stream: The Agile Organisation

Dr Nish Mahanty is a Program Manager. He has over 17 years experience working in IT, having worked in several start-ups and consultancies before long stints at SEEK, nabCapital, and MYOB. 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

SANDY MAMOLI | Owner / Co-Founder, nomad8

Stream: The Agile Organisation

Living proof that love will make you do crazy things, Sandy Mamoli moved to NZ in 2007 to follow her heart and has been trapped in the wilds of Wellington ever since. From working with Sony Ericsson's global enterprise website in Amsterdam and Copenhagen to being one of NZ's leading Agile coaches and Chair of Agile Welly (www.meetup.com/agilewelly), Sandy brings her practical European flair and passionate advocacy of all things Agile to NZ businesses.

She's a former Olympian, a geek, a gadget junkie and emerging triathlete. She is one of the owners and co-founders of Nomad8 (www.nomad8.com) and one of the brains behind Kanbanfor1 (www.kanbanfor1.com). She knows quite a lot about Agile.