Call to Papers is Closed as of 10/1/2018
Keynote Speakers
We have two incredible keynote speakers lined up for you.
Heidi Helfand
Monday February, 25th 2019
Heidi Helfand brings a practitioner approach with 18 years coaching and influencing cross-functional teams. She was an early employee at two highly successful startups from roughly 10 team members to 700. The first was ExpertCity, Inc. (acquired by CitrixOnline) where she was on the development team that invented GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. After that she was ScrumMaster turned Principal Agile Coach at AppFolio, Inc., a SAAS workflow software company that went public in 2015. She is currently Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies.
Karl Scotland
Tuesday February 26th, 2019
Karl Scotland helps businesses to become learning oriented organizations. Over the last 15 years he has been an advocate of Lean and Agile approaches. He has worked with companies such as BBC, Yahoo!, EMC Consulting, Rally Software, Cisco and SDL. During that time, he has been a pioneer of using Kanban Systems and Strategy Deployment for product development, a founding member of both the Lean Systems Society and Limited WIP Society, as well as being an active community member and a regular conference speaker. In addition, Karl has been awarded the honorary Brickell Key Community Contribution Award at the 2013 Lean Kanban North America conference.
Session Speakers
Colleen Johnson
Colleen Johnson is the Practice Director of Adaptive Agile at ImagineX Consulting. Colleen applies a systems thinking approach to aligning agile methodologies across the enterprise and works with clients to apply the right cultural and context-driven practices to create sustainable agility. She is an expert in Lean/Kanban methods of software delivery and advocates for scientific methods of customer-centered discovery. She is active in the agile community locally as a member of Agile Denver Board of Directors and Chairwoman of the 2016 & 2017 Mile High Agile Conference and nationally as a member of the Agile Uprising Board of Directors. She is the CoFounder and CEO of ScatterSpoke, a space for more effective team retrospectives. In her free time she enjoys running, yoga and camping and hiking with her family.
Matt Philip
As a capability cultivator, organizational fitness coach and workplace activist, Matt helps organizations and teams continuously become fit for their purpose. He is especially passionate about building learning organizations and creating humanizing and engaging work environments.
He tweets at @mattphilip, blogs at https://mattphilip.wordpress.com/ and shares his presentations at http://www.slideshare.net/MatthewPhilip.
He tweets at @mattphilip, blogs at https://mattphilip.wordpress.com/ and shares his presentations at http://www.slideshare.net/MatthewPhilip.
Julia Wester
Julia is the co-founder of Lagom Solutions, a Lean/Agile consulting and training company that pulls from her 17 years of experience working in and managing teams at Turner Broadcasting, F5 Networks and LeanKit. Julia is passionate about teaching others how to tame the chaos of everyday work by embracing transparency, continuous improvement and a lagom mindset, as well as talking about how management doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Julia blogs at everydaykanban.com and tweets at @everydaykanban. Don't forget to visit https://lagom.solutions to see what Julia and Lagom Solutions can do for you!
Chris McDermott
Chris is an independent Lean Agile Coach, founder of Lean Agile Scotland and Lean Agile Glasgow and knows enough about most things under the Lean Agile banner to be both effective and dangerous all in one session.
He caught the Agile bug in 2003 when, as a developer, he borrowed his brother-in-law’s copy of XP Explained (which he foolishly returned). In around 2010 he found Lean, ToC and stumbled across Systems Thinking. This led to founding the Lean Agile Scotland conference in a desire to bring together lots of smart people to learn from and to introduce others in Scotland to these ideas. In the past few years his interest in Complexity Theory has grown. His head is now a tangled mess of all of the things he’s learned in the last 15 years which he suspects it will take the next 15 years to make sense of. He intends to offload some of that sensemaking burden on you.
Susan Almon
Susan Almon has been a consultant for most of her career, helping clients identify and solve problems, in many roles across industries. At Blue Spurs, she leads Agile teams to deliver solutions for clients. With a passion for gathering, sharing and implementing innovative ideas, she has an extensive collection of tools and techniques to help clear some of her clients’ most pressing roadblocks and make their day better.
Continually exploring, Susan recently completed the Ten Women Strong #WomenInAgile program and the Bredemeyer Consulting Software Architecture Workshop.
She tweets at @susanalmon
Continually exploring, Susan recently completed the Ten Women Strong #WomenInAgile program and the Bredemeyer Consulting Software Architecture Workshop.
She tweets at @susanalmon
Melissa Boggs
Melissa Boggs is the Chief ScrumMaster for the Scrum Alliance. Together with the Chief Product Owner and the exceptional staff, Melissa seeks to fulfill the Scrum Alliance's vision of transforming the world of work. Since 2001, Melissa has embraced experiences in leadership, business, and product development. Her experience with applying, consulting, coaching, and training agile values and principles spans executive teams, software teams, marketers, and educators in domains such as healthcare, public education, e-learning, security software, government agencies, and communication technology. As a consultant and as an executive, she has consistently embodied the Scrum values, and additionally holds dear her personal values of Courage, Empathy, and Creativity. Melissa is a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Certified Team Coach (CTC), Certified Agile Leader 1 (CAL1), Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP), Kanban Management Professional (KMP I), and a Project Management Professional (PMP). She holds an MBA in IT Management and a B.S. in Information Technology from Western Governors University.
Jean-Paul Bayley
Jean-Paul Bayley is a partner at Actineo Consulting specialising in business agility and organisational development. He is a Certified Trainer for Training from the BACK of the Room!, organiser of the Playcamp London conference, Innovation Games Certified Collaboration Instructor, LKU Accredited Kanban Trainer and co-creator of the Kanban Guide.
Lisa Cooney
Lisa Cooney is an Agile Coach at Blackstone Technology Group where she supports the Strategic Technology Management office at U.S. Department of Homeland Security in their efforts to bring Agile into the organization. She has been ScrumMaster for teams of software developers as well as instructional designers and subject matter experts. Lisa is a co-organizer for the DC Women in Agile Meetup, on the review team for the Learning track at Agile 2019, and is editor for Michael Hamman's upcoming book, “Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside-Out.” Her interests include cognitive science, business agility, Agile leadership, Agile instructional design, and behavioral psychology.
Deema Dajani
Deema led some of the largest transformations to business agility and lean agile portfolios in Financial Services. Drawing on background with high growth Startups and an MBA from Kellogg, Deema helped well established organizations create the environment to shape disruption. She cofounded Women in Agile.org and a supporter of Lean Agile US.
Jennifer Dyni
After having many roles on her 18+ years on software project teams, Jennifer Dyni is currently an Agile Coach and Engineering Team Owner with Ultimate Software. Her passion is helping teams foster highly collaborative and creative work environments while making great solutions. In addition to leading like-minded professionals, Jennifer is also the leader of her daughter's Girl Scout Troop... where she continues to receive lots of lessons on how (not) to deliver feedback to future leaders. Connect with Jennifer on twitter @jenniferdyni or on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-dyni.
Colleen Esposito
As an Agile Coach, I help organizations and the people in them, realize their full potential. I meet the organization where they are, inviting them to experiment with agile practices while they engage their customers to provide better products than they could envision on their own. I use a collaborative approach and a light touch to bring out the best in people and teams, but am courageous enough to speak the truth with respect when I see something that needs to be addressed. I draw on my accomplishments leading large and successful teams of diversely located cross-functional employees as well as my skills in communication, strategic planning and problem-solving to help the teams adapt to changing organizational structures while focusing on results. I'm working towards a mastery of singing, and spend most weekends boating and snorkeling on the blue-green waters outside Pompano Beach Florida.
Gary Fleming
As an agile coach focussing on technical practices and software crafting, Gary Fleming tries to help teams fill the gaps they have when it comes time to do the work. Sometimes that means helping development teams better their testing practices, increasing their communication, or learning how to do reliable, well-structured, well-tested, continuous delivery many times per day. Coaching, mentoring, writing, and showing; whatever helps in the context. You'll find him at various local meetups trying to both share what he knows and learn from his peers.
Sarah Harper
I am a data-driven, process improvement, and true-agile convert! As a Lead Development Project Manager at Cerner Corporation, I've worked with a lot of teams on agile projects and seen it all. As I've transitioned over to Kanban and studied the Toyota Principles, I've come to appreciate efficiency and flow and started embracing the kaizen mindset in all that I do. When not working on Security projects at Cerner or helping to coach teams, I am at the mercy of my twin four-year-olds.
Trent Hone
Trent Hone is a Managing Consultant with Excella and an award-winning naval historian. He works with software, IT, and other organizations to improve their art of practice, increase effectiveness, and accelerate learning. He has helped dozens of government and commercial teams around the world in Asia, Oceania, Europe, and North America. Trent writes and speaks about organizational learning, doctrine, and strategy and how the three interrelate. He has been awarded the U.S. Naval War College's Edward S. Miller Prize and the Naval History and Heritage Command's Ernest M. Eller Prize, and he was a finalist for Lean Kanban's Brickell Key Award. He has presented at the Annual Agile Conference, Lean Kanban North America, Lean Agile US, Lean Agile Scotland, the McMullen Naval History Symposium, and the Society of Military History's Annual Meeting. His latest book, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945, was published in June 2018.
Mark Kilby
Mark Kilby has cultivated more distributed, dispersed, and virtual teams than colocated teams for more than two decades. Currently, Mark serves as an agile coach with Sonatype, a “remote first” software development company focusing on automation of software supply chains. Previously, Mark led agile transformations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Mark also cultivates dispersed communities, such as Agile Orlando, Agile Florida, VirtualTeamTalk.com, and the Agile Alliance Community Group Support initiative. Mark’s book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, is co-authored with Johanna Rothman and is available now via http://markkilby.com and
https://leanpub.com/geographicallydistributedagileteams
https://leanpub.com/geographicallydistributedagileteams
Anjali Leon
Awakening new possibilities…connecting people to PeoPLe and people to ideas. Over two decades of leadership and technical experience allows Anjali to bring a unique perspective to the delicate balance between the flexibility and rigor necessary for individuals and organizations to thrive in today’s complex world. Through her coaching practice Pragmatic Project Leadership, she and her collaborators teach, mentor, and coach on organizational agility, creative collaboration, and conscious leadership with a focus on value delivery - consistently delivering outstanding results and great outcomes for her clients.
Anjali has a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Drexel University and numerous Project Management, Leadership, and Agile Certifications under her belt. She shares her enthusiasm and belief in an Agile way of thinking and working as an engaging speaker, community organizer and mentor for budding Agilists particularly women.
Anjali has a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Drexel University and numerous Project Management, Leadership, and Agile Certifications under her belt. She shares her enthusiasm and belief in an Agile way of thinking and working as an engaging speaker, community organizer and mentor for budding Agilists particularly women.
Ryan Lockard
Ryan Lockard has over 17 years of experience in software delivery and is currently the VP of Consulting at Contino, a global leader in DevOps & Cloud enablement. He has led multiple development organizations and facilitated various culture transformations in various industries including Intellectual Property, Advertising, Science, Publishing, Manufacturing, ERP Delivery, Clinical Decision Support and Learning. A finalist for the 2016 Philadelphia Tech Leader of the Year, Ryan also serves as a coach and mentor to emerging delivery professionals. He was also a member of the Harrisburg University corporate faculty, the Agile Uprising, and an independent lean development trainer. Based in Philadelphia/New York/London, Ryan is an avid reader, host of the Agile Uprising podcast (which has reached over 120K listeners in over 100 countries) and loving father of three. He is incrementally becoming a great husband.
Becky McNeeley
Becky has been working in the IT industry for over 25 years and has spent the last ten years leading software development teams at Ultimate Software. She currently works on the Lean Agile Process Improvement team at Ultimate as a Principal Agile Coach. Her focus is on coaching and training software development teams on Kanban and Lean principles in order to bring efficiency and predictability to the organization.
Blake Nyquist
Blake Nyquist was hooked the moment he experienced "the agile way" cohesively in action. In the years since, he has passionately helped teams grow and improve the way they work using agile and lean principles, all while having some fun along the way. A recovering software developer himself, his experience includes government contracting, web & desktop software products, and internet infrastructure. Blake's focus on servant and transformational leadership has fostered guiding teams towards healthy collaboration, enabling lasting and impactful change in numerous organizations.
Sarala Pandey
Sarala Pandey is presently serving as Digital QA Manager for Huntington National Bank. She is responsible for managing resource, creating and maintaining QA standards for the Digital Channels. Sarala is accountable for all QA personnel and project delivery for Retail Online, Business Online, Online Account Opening, Mobile Applications, and Huntington.com. She drives all QA phases of the Agile development process and responsible for quarterly delivery of all Digital applications to production. In addition, Sarala has enhanced organizational efficiency & efficacy by piloting test automation, exploratory testing, and the continuing education program. Sarala began her career in QA with an internship at Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Over the course of 20 years, she has served as a QA Analyst, QA Lead, Off-shore Liaison, and finally as a QA Manager. She is responsible for delivering industry-wide SDLC standards to AT&T/IBM, SypherLink and Huntington National Bank.
Steve Porter
Steve Porter is an ALM mentor/coach/trainer who has a strong background in multiple project management styles. Over the past several years, he has focused his efforts on Agile practices in general and the Scrum Framework in particular. He has recently worked as the Product Owner for TeamPulse, Telerik’s agile project management tool, and before that has filled the Scrum Master role along with the role of Team Member on many Scrum projects. His hands-on experience with all three Scrum roles makes him an excellent trainer. Steve is currently employed by Scrum.org and works in close collaboration with Ken Schwaber on his mission to improve the profession of software development. He plays an active role in the creation of all Scrum.org training material, and assessments. Most recently Steve was one of only 8 acknowledged contributors to Ken Schwaber’s Nexus framework; a framework for scaled Scrum initiatives.
Evelien Roos
Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Coach at Xebia and a Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org. She has a profound knowledge of Agile and Scrum and knows how to transfer that to teams, Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Her passion with Agile centers on the teams and individuals within them. She loves to get teams up and running and then help them continuously improve. She has helped many teams at different organisations to become more Agile (like ING, Rabobank, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, APG, Philips, VodafoneZiggo). She is also the Scrum Master of the Scrum Boosters within Xebia, helping other Scrum affected people to become better in Scrum. Evelien loves to give training for beginning as well as experienced Scrummers. Her training courses are filled with brain based learning activities. In her classes she lets the learner learn instead of the teacher teach. Evelien was born in Zoetermeer, currently living in Helmond with her husband and 3 kids.
Chris Shinkle
Chris is a practitioner and maker. He is a thought leader and continually initiates new ideas and continuous improvement at SEP. His experience comes from building products with many large clients in a variety of industries: aerospace, medical, healthcare, finance, etc. He introduced and guided SEP's adoption of Agile software development practices in 2004 followed by Lean and Kanban in 2007.
As SEP's Director of Innovation, Chris leverages many community ideas helping SEP engineers and clients delivery better products. Chris speaks at conferences across the United States promoting Agile, Lean/Kanban, Product Management, and Design Thinking. Chris was an inaugural members of Indiana's Techpoint Tech 25.
As SEP's Director of Innovation, Chris leverages many community ideas helping SEP engineers and clients delivery better products. Chris speaks at conferences across the United States promoting Agile, Lean/Kanban, Product Management, and Design Thinking. Chris was an inaugural members of Indiana's Techpoint Tech 25.
Prateek Singh
Prateek Singh has been leading and working on agile teams for the 12+ years. Starting with XP, then Scrum and now working in a Kanban system, Prateek has gained a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding agile techniques, practices and implementation principles. Prateek is currently a Principal Agile Coach at Ultimate Software conducting training and coaching for teams regarding Kanban and Lean principles. Prateek has played the role of Software Engineer, Scrum Master and Manager of Software Engineering in his career.
Joey Spooner
Joey Spooner is an Accredited Kanban Trainer and Kanban Coaching Professional at TriTech Enterprise Systems, Inc. In a 17 year career spanning the communications, insurance, higher education, non-profit, and government sectors, Joey has been a software developer, IT director, strategic analyst, and technical expert. He blogs at www.spoonstein.com and tweets as @spoonstein. Joey holds a Bachelors in Business Administration.
Jenny Tarwater
Jenny Tarwater is an International Speaker, Collaboration Coach and Agile Trainer. She has 25 years of corporate experience bringing all parts of an organization together to reliably deliver large-scale software initiatives. Jenny has a passion for empowering the adoption and understanding of Agile values, principles and practices. Jenny is an active member of the agile community, organizing several conferences (Women in Agile, Lean Agile KC) and MeetUps (AgileKC, Games for Agility Learning and Engagement).
Troy Tuttle
Troy Tuttle is a Lean-Agile coach, software developer mentor, and consultant with over 12 years of experience working in Lean-Agile environments. He currently operates KanFlow, a consulting firm dedicated to helping software professionals, teams, and organizations improve by the study and application of Lean and Agile principles through training, coaching, and mentoring.
Troy has been involved in the community as a conference organizer, user group facilitator, and speaker. In 2015, he founded the Lean Agile Kansas City conference. For the last decade, he has facilitated a Lean-Agile user group in the KC area for the benefit of Lean and Agile practitioners. Troy has been a speaker in the Lean-Agile space since 2010, promoting Lean-Agile ideas at conferences like Lean Kanban North America, Agile Alliance, and Lean Agile US.
Most of Troy's work is directed by approaches that support the why behind Lean and Agile, even if that means questioning the Agile industry’s status quo.
Daniel Vacanti
Daniel Vacanti is a 25-plus year software industry veteran who has spent most of his career focusing on Lean and Agile practices. In 2007, he helped to develop the Kanban Method for knowledge work and managed the world’s first project implementation of Kanban that year. He has been conducting Lean-Agile training, coaching, and consulting ever since. In 2011 he founded ActionableAgileTM (previously Corporate Kanban) which provides industry-leading predictive analytics tools and services organizations that utilize Lean-Agile practices. In 2015 he published his book, “Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability”, which is the definitive guide to flow-based metrics and analytics. Daniel holds an M.B.A. and regularly teaches a class on lean principles for software management at the University of California Berkeley.
Yuval Yeret
With over 24 years in IT/Technology, Yuval has been helping AgileSparks enterprise clients scale agile since 2009, working with companies such as Intel, Siemens, Amdocs, HP, Nice Actimize, Eagle Investments. He is a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT4) You can check out his thinking on the AgileSparks blog, in his popular personal blog at YuvalYeret.com or in his book “Holy Land Kanban”. Yuval is currently based in Boston with a focus both on enterprise agility and SAFe as well as wider organizational agility and especially Agile Marketing.
Ivan Font
Passionate about Business Agility, Lean Change Management, Lean & Agile Product Development. My commitment is to unlock sustainable ways of working for teams and organizations, helping them deliver faster value in a more predictable way while having fun at work. I consider myself to hold an international entrepreneur spirit with more than 20 years of experience in the Internet and eCommerce Industry.
Debbie Levitt
Debbie Levitt, CEO of Ptype UX & Product Design Agency, has been a UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a "serial contractor" who lived in the Bay Area for most of this decade, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Oracle, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, "Mary Poppins," because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure. Debbie has presented at conferences including eBay's Developer Conference, PayPal's Developer Conference, UXPA, and WeAreDevelopers. She is an O'Reilly published author and one of few instructors on the planet recommended by Axure. Outside of UX work, and sometimes during UX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave. She's now a Digital Nomad splitting her time between the USA and rural Italy.
Cheryl Hammond
Cheryl Hammond, aka @bsktcase, has a couple decades' experience as a software leader in the private and public sectors. She ran her team's successful adoption of Scrumban for a mission-critical regulatory compliance project under multi-agency state and federal government oversight; mentored former COBOL devs into true-believing, unit-testing XP evangelists; and turned a threatened software product at risk of litigation into a lean, revenue-generating flagship offering in nine months, all of which leads her to believe that anything is possible. She is not sorry for her many biases, including strong preferences for servant-style leadership and team-based, holistic problem-solving and a strong aversion to agile zealotry. Whether consulting or in-house, Cheryl endeavors to make life suck less for software delivery organizations and the humans who inhabit them.
Ryan Latta
My mission is to create teams that change the world.
I began this mission as a software developer. I saw in myself and other teams a passion for creating products that people would use and love. I saw that same passion dashed over and over again when the products fell flat. I knew there was more out there.
I have sought for years to find ways of enabling teams and organizations to have a different story. One where the hard work pays off. One where people take pride in a job well done and a product that people love.
I'm a long way off still from saying my mission is accomplished, but I'm here to share what I've learned and to help people find that new story.
Montra Ellis
Montra Ellis is the Director of Growth Strategy at Ultimate Software. Montra and her team are responsible for Ultimate’s Innovation strategy and looking forward for impactful product, industry and technology trends.
She’s been in the Technology industry for almost 20 years, which has allowed Montra the opportunity to be exposed to a significant number of client verticals in varying degrees. The experiences from those years span from managing worldwide DSP distribution for Texas Instruments to being a road warrior for a boutique Agile Software consultancy before landing at Ultimate Software.
Montra has spoken at various conferences including SXSW and Grace Hopper on many topics such as PO roles in the Agile world, panels focused on “frugal” innovation in Africa and women’s roles, intersectionality and success in Technology.
Jennifer Madel
Jennifer Madel has been leading teams in the IT industry for over 18 years. Her career path has included managing and scrum master-ing several technical teams as well as agile coach. She currently works on the Lean Agile Process Improvement team at Ultimate Software as Agile Coach. This role allows her to use her leadership and Agile experience to train and coach teams on Kanban and Lean principles. She also utilizes these principles to parent her 3-year-old twin boys!
Ramesh Nori
Ramesh Nori is a "SAFe Program Consultant"(SAFe SPC 4) and for Lean Enterprises (www.scaledagileframework.com)
He is currently working as an Enterprise Agile Coach and SAFe Consultant helping large and small organizations alike, few of which are from South Florida.
A self-admitted agile enthusiast and evangelist with over 15 years in the Project Management field, Ramesh has worked passionately to encourage and support the Organizations in fully embracing Agile methodologies for Product development with the sole vision of making SproutLoud Media Networks, an “Agile Enterprise”.
His latest achievements include establishing the path forward towards Business agility in two large enterprises and the successful Implementation of Scaled Agile (SAFe) Framework at SproutLoud Media Networks.
His vast areas of expertise and interests include Scaled Agile implementations, Program and Portfolio Management, Business agility at scale, Simplified solutions with Agile methods involving common sense approaches.
Ramesh also has a Master's Degree in Collaborative Project Management.