Speakers

Home »  Speakers

 

Tom Photo Linked InTom Paider, Associate Vice President for Nationwide Insurance – Keynote Speaker

Tom Paider is an IT executive for Nationwide, a Fortune 100 Insurance and financial services company. He received his BS degree in Business Administration and his Master’s degree in Operational Excellence.  His teams work across Nationwide to foster lean thinking and improve software development capability. He is also a lean coach in the Masters in Business Operational Excellence program at The Ohio State University.  He is the cofounder of the IT Leadership Network at the Center for Operational Excellence, a partnership between industry and academic leaders focused on helping member companies collaborate and sustain their lean journeys. Tom is co-author of the book The Lean IT Field Guide – A Roadmap for your Transformation, 2016.

Linked in Scott PhotoScott Ambler,  Enterprise Agile Coach, Scott Ambler & Associates – Endnote Speaker

Scott Ambler is the Senior Consulting Partner of Scott Ambler + Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. Scott is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile (DA), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. He is the (co-)author of several books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Ed., and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott blogs about DAD at DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com. Scott is also a Founding Member of the Disciplined Agile Consortium (DAC), the certification body for disciplined agile. He can be reached at scott@scottambler.com.

Track Speakers and Panelists Listed Below in Alphabetical Order by Last Name

Shahn photo croppsedShahn Alware, Manager, KPMG Advisory Services

Shahn is a manager in KPMG’s Advisory Services with more than 14 years of experience in software development and engineering, leading teams using Agile methodology with a strong focus on UX and CX. With his strong product management, team building, and technical abilities, he has delivered over 15 successful products for large enterprise across multiple verticals. Shahn also leads the product development of the tools and processes for the KPMG’s Design Thinking platform. He has delivered solutions in major industries and sectors such as finance, music, telecom expense management, unified communications, IT, sports, and design agencies. He has worked closely with C level executives as a product development lead to deliver key strategic products.

“Agile Project Portfolio Management” – While Agile method of software development is being adopted by a wide range of organizations around the world, there are still significant number of organizations struggling with Agile Portfolio Management and connecting strategy to execution. Additionally portfolio management are still aligned to traditional methods, morphing into hybrid models and not able to realize full benefits of Agile. In this presentation, approach to Agile Portfolio Management will be discussed. Major differences between the traditional Waterfall portfolio management and the Agile project portfolio management processes will be highlighted with the special emphasis on the following topics:

  • Portfolio Manager’s Role in the Agile World
  • Managing Resources for Agile Portfolio
  • Managing Risks and Benefits
  • Effective Metrics for Agile Portfolio Management

Stephen AuxStephen Aux, Chief Information Officer, Department of Conservation & Natural Resources – Panel Discussion Speaker

Stephen Aux joined Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) assuming the role of Chief Information Officer in June 2011. In the role, Stephen is responsible for developing and implementing DCNR’s overall IT strategy and oversees all IT functions and operations.  Prior to joining DCNR, Stephen was the Director for Enterprise Architecture for the Office of Administration, specializing in translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change.  Throughout his 15 year career, Stephen has held various technical positions of increasing scope and responsibility. Stephen holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science from Shippensburg University and is passionate about pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the world of information technology.

Sean B PhotoSean Berquist, Advisory Services, KPMG LLP – Panel Discussion Speaker

Sean is a part of KPMG’s Automation, Integration and Information Practice, focusing on Agile development and Business Process Management technology.  Sean also leads the KPMG Center of Excellence for a leading Business Process Management software provider. He is working to leverage the power of BPM, the Cloud, and Agile to transform his clients’ approach to IT, and has led the delivery and rollout of Agile projects in numerous industries, including Pharma, Insurance, and Financial Services.

Sean has worn many hats in the industry, including developer, tester, scrum master, technical architect and project manager. He began his career working on traditional full-life cycle JAVA implementations, and witnessed first-hand the evolution of business stakeholders becoming increasingly involved in IT project delivery and the rise of Agile. From his on-the-ground perspective, Sean has learned from experience how to identify, manage, and mitigate risk on complex implementations, and how to leverage Agile to optimize project success.

Scott BlackerScott Blacker, Vice President Product, AgileCraft

Scott Blacker is a 15 year Product Management veteran with experience leading the product function at multiple early-stage technology companies through periods of explosive growth. At AgileCraft Scott is responsible for defining, executing against, and bringing to market the company’s products and services, and has helped dozens of companies implement agile practices at scale. As part of his role brining AgileCraft’s products to market, Scott has focused on supporting companies executing ‘bimodal’ development practices where portions of the organization work in an agile context and portions work in a more traditional (sometimes waterfall) context.

“Help! My Teams are Agile but my Execs are Waterfall!” – Organizations in the midst of a bottoms-up agile transformation can find themselves in a quandary. Even though some (or even all) teams may have adopted agile at the developer / program level, PMOs are often still required to plan, resource, and report on progress with almost no consideration given to the methodologies of the underlying work. This session will address questions like:
• How can an organization that practices traditional strategic planning at the executive level map budgets and plans down to Agile teams, and have reporting roll back up in a way that maps back to the original planning process?
• What does it really mean for an organization to become “Agile” at the portfolio and enterprise level?
• As organizations transform to an agile approach, how do leaders avoid creating two separate reporting structures to understand progress?
• How can portfolio and enterprise level planners put in plans to transform the entire organization (top-to-bottom) to an agile model?

Jim DamatoJim Damato, Solutions Architect, CA Technologies

Jim’s expertise includes applying Agile in a real-world, hands-on, boots-on-the-ground way; and helping customers through the hybrid-hell that comes when implementations move beyond theory and get messy. Jim is has certifications PMI-ACP, SA, CSP, CSM, PMP, ITIL.

“Let’s Play Agile Coach! (Agile Metrics Case Studies)” – Learn how to judge the health of your Agile teams by doing a health check with real customer case study data. We’ll look at data on team performance based on various Agile metrics such as Burnups/Burndowns, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Velocity Chart, SDPI charts, and more. This will help to interpret possible challenges the team is facing and determine prescriptive action items that will influence improvement. This will be an interactive session, where we’ll examine how to mine for internal performance data, evaluate what we can deduce from actions happening outside the boundaries of agile practices and pinpoint areas that will have the most impact on future projects to get them back on track. The goal is to turn work into data, data into insights and insight into action.

 

Chris de Leon, Division Chief IT Project Management, PennDOT

Chris is a Division Chief at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and has been with the Commonwealth since 2011. He has worked as a Senior Project Manager with Ciber and Computer Sciences Corporation.

“The Road to Agile – PennDOT’s Transformation to Iterative and Agile Methods”  – PennDOTPennDOT’s business areas are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve upon and transform their existing business processes through the use of automation and new technology. Future IT projects will be of a highly complexity with opportunities for huge gains in efficiency, cost savings and positive business transformation.

With limited budgets and human resources, the Information Systems and Technology Office (ISTO) must be responsive to changing user needs and be able to quickly deliver quality solutions. To meet those needs, ISTO has become more agile and iterative in its project development and delivery approach.

The returns have been tremendous, with the delivery of new software that has saved thousands of hours of workers time and millions of taxpayer dollars. We expect more great results in the future as this journey has just begun.

Todd Farnand 2016

Todd Farnand, IT Project Manager and Agile coach, PPL Electric Utilities

Todd has been very fortunate to be responsible for an Agile transformation in PPL’s IT department – where they use both Kanban and Scrum.

“Being Flexible using Agile – PPL’s journey to Agile Transformation” – PPL Electric Utilities started in 2009 with a fare dose of skepticism but low and behold Agile is now a standard for delivering projects.  The success is all about have good coaches, keeping an Agile mindset and fostering the right mix of grass roots and senior leadership advocacy.

James Gifford PhotoJames Gifford, Senior Manager Lean /Agile Coach, Genesis Consulting – Speaker

James Gifford, AKA Scrummando, is an Agile Coach with a passion for making organizations more Agile and Lean. He has been part of multiple agile transformations within the financial and pharma services Industries and enjoys studying patterns and differences that exist between the unique industries. When he’s not coaching, he can be found rebuilding jeeps or teaching his Four year old daughter how to pickle peppers at his home in Lincoln University, Pennsylvania.

“Program Modeling and CFD Providing Insights Into the Most Chaotic Program” – James’ session will be focused on providing program managers and teams tools to monitor and a course correct delivery using Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Progressive Program Modeling to effectively manage program. CFD helps visualize how work is being delivered over time. Showing things like scope changes, work in progress, and work accepted towards the completion of the project or program. In our practice we use CFD to monitor progress and look for issues in delivery from the team level all the way to the program level. This allows for seeding retrospective with relevant data to help drive some of the conversations. It potentially helps identify organizational and environmental issue plaguing the teams.

Ryan_LockardRyan Lockard, Manager, Software Engineering, Elsevier

Ryan is a CSP, agility leader and a manager of 4 agile teams that support a Health Care LMS and clinical support system.  He has facilitated multiple agile transformations and serves as a coach and mentor to various teams and emerging agile professionals.

“Agile Culture Transformation from the Trenches” – Understanding agility, people, and purpose are fundamental pillars to any decision to approach agile transformations.  Assuming swapping one process for another is a common trap organizations fall into that setup sub-optimized teams.  This talk will cover establishing a baseline of agility, organizational adaptation of lean thinking and some evidence based exercises that reinforce positive team culture and engagement from my 15 years of experience.

Michael McCalla photoMichael McCalla, President, Achieving Agility

Michael McCalla is a technology leader, transformation specialist, and avid agile practitioner that has a passion for building great products, strong teams, and valuable business outcomes. Michael has over 15 years of product management experience in the financial services industry where he has led the delivery of high quality business solutions.  He grew up in a number of start-ups,  playing multiple roles, and seeing the software development lifecycle from a variety of lenses.  Michael has spent the last five years leading enterprise-wide agile adoption initiatives.  He has broad range of experience applying agile to small teams, large distributed teams, and portfolio management.  He enjoys “coaching” and assisting new agile practitioners.  He prides himself on being a true student of the game, consistently looking to improve his craft by networking, speaking, reading, and being engaged on social media. He is the President and Owner of Achieving Agility in the Philadelphia area.

“Caution: Scaling Bad Scrum Leads to More Chaos” – The Agile universe has been invaded by scaling frameworks. Executives have taken the bait and are pushing their organizations to scale.  But they should proceed with caution.  At the core of all the scaling frameworks are scrum teams whose main purpose is to continuously deliver value in the form of working software to the customer. Unfortunately, many scrum teams are unable to achieve this goal each sprint due to abundance of issues both micro and macro. Scaling bad scrum could actually magnify these problems and slow down productivity. This interactive discussion will present a case study in which scaling scrum was counter-productive, and will reiterate some basic, but often forgotten, scrum team best practices!

Todd Miller PhotoTodd Miller, Delivery Director, Celerity – Speaker

Todd is a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org and has been an Agile Coach, ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Developer and has led agile transformations as an Agile coach.

“Scrum: Quality Matters” – Scrum is a framework which can be used to solve complex problems. However, Scrum only implies the need for high quality and does not suggest how quality should continually be addressed. A Scrum implementation that focuses on quality and technical excellence is more likely to succeed than one that doesn’t. Quality is everybody’s responsibility not just Quality Assurance Analysts.
So how do you address quality on a Scrum project? This presentation will address some ways you can instill quality into the fabric of your Development teams. Encouraging the implementation of cross-functional teams, the proper use of a definition of “done”, increasing feedback loops to developers (Source Control, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Code Coverage, etc.) and practices teams can adopt (Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Clean Code, etc.).

Phil Petrina photo1Philip Petrina, Agile ScrumMaster/Coach, PennDOT

Phil is a Project Manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and has been with the Commonwealth since 2004.   He has lead the primary adoption of agile within PennDOT through the successful execution of multiple projects.

“The Road to Agile – PennDOT’s Transformation to Iterative and Agile Methods”  – PennDOTPennDOT’s business areas are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve upon and transform their existing business processes through the use of automation and new technology. Future IT projects will be of a highly complexity with opportunities for huge gains in efficiency, cost savings and positive business transformation.

With limited budgets and human resources, the Information Systems and Technology Office (ISTO) must be responsive to changing user needs and be able to quickly deliver quality solutions. To meet those needs, ISTO has become more agile and iterative in its project development and delivery approach.

The returns have been tremendous, with the delivery of new software that has saved thousands of hours of workers time and millions of taxpayer dollars. We expect more great results in the future as this journey has just begun.

Deven PhotoDeven Trivedi, PMP, ACP, Manager, KPMG Technology Enablement Advisory Services

Deven has more than 18 years of experience managing large IT integration and transformation projects, project portfolio management and PMO assessment/governance. Deven has managed multiple projects using Agile methodology and have successfully implemented Agile Project Management and Software Development methodology for mid to large size organizations. Deven has worked with the Fortune 500 corporations in varying industries including life science, financial, insurance, media and industrial manufacturing sector. Deven provides thought leadership at KPMG in the area of Agile methodology. Deven holds PMP and ACP certification from Project Management Institute. Deven holds Masters in Chemical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and MBA from Rutgers University. Deven is a board member and vice president at PMI New Jersey chapter for the past 4 years and have held various leadership positions within PMINJ chapter for more than 15 years.  Deven is co-presenter with Shahn Alware on “Agile Project Portfolio Management”.

“Agile Project Portfolio Management” – While Agile method of software development is being adopted by a wide range of organizations around the world, there are still significant number of organizations struggling with Agile Portfolio Management and connecting strategy to execution. Additionally portfolio management are still aligned to traditional methods, morphing into hybrid models and not able to realize full benefits of Agile. In this presentation, approach to Agile Portfolio Management will be discussed. Major differences between the traditional Waterfall portfolio management and the Agile project portfolio management processes will be highlighted with the special emphasis on the following topics:

  • Portfolio Manager’s Role in the Agile World
  • Managing Resources for Agile Portfolio
  • Managing Risks and Benefits
  • Effective Metrics for Agile Portfolio Management