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Agile Symposium 2023 - Speakers

alicia
aitken

Speaker

An executive with international experience and a proven track record of establishing and growing businesses and executing on strategy having founded, grown and sold a number businesses before taking on a range of roles in publicly listed companies and the private sector.

Non-executive director and advisory board member for Joyous, Cloudfloat, Pioneera, OPV, Astrolabe Group and ICCPM

A globally-recognised thought leader in project management practices specialising in investment, delivery and risk management of projects in complex environments including Infrastructure, Aerospace & Defence, Telecommunications, Banking and Technology.

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sanjiv
augustine

Speaker

Sanjiv Augustine is the Founder and CEO of LitheSpeed, a world-leading agile training and consulting company; and an industry-leading agile, lean, and digital transformation expert. He was a co-founder of the PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP) and the Agile Leadership Network (ALN). He is the author of the books "Managing Agile Projects," "Scaling Agile" and "From PMO to VMO." Sanjiv presents regularly at several agile conferences and project management events.

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dr jen frahm

Session Chair

Dr Jen Frahm is the co-founder of The Agile Change Leadership Institute and builds change capability in organizations. She is a global expert on organisational change, communication and transformation, a tamer of ambiguity, speaker of truths and solver of problems. A sought-after speaker she is known for being at the frontier of business agility and change. She is the author of Change. Leader – The changes you need to make first (2021) and Conversations of Change: A guide to workplace change (2017), and co-author of The Agile Change Playbook (2020). She has designed and delivered change across multiple industries and professions, from wine sales to wedding dresses, veterinary products to energy retailers, nuns and engineers, big banks, small IT companies, publicly listed, privately owned and non-profit organizations, and across twenty-eight countries. She now lives and works on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung (Naarm / Melbourne), Australia.

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peter
lam

Session Chair

Peter has designed, led and embedded some of the largest and most complex Ways of Working and Agile transformations in Australasia. The kind of roles he has worked in recently include: Head of Projects, Head of Delivery, Centre of Expertise (COE) Lead (Ways of Working, Program Delivery), Program Manager and Enterprise Agile Coach.

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mark 
lines

Keynote Speaker

Mark Lines is co-creator of Disciplined Agile with Scott W. Ambler and co-author of several books on Disciplined Agile (DA) including “Choose your WoW” translated into 8 languages.   He has over 30 years of experience helping organizations around the world to be successful with solution delivery using Agile, Lean, Traditional, and Hybrid approaches.  Mark is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences worldwide.  He lives in Calgary, Alberta in the foot hills of the Canadian Rockies.

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niall mcshane

Panellist

"To sum up what I offer as a professional I have this sentence. Performance with purpose through Agility. Essentially, I am a performance coach who works with agile systems to enable them to deliver value to organisations and the wider society. To enable organisational agility, I advise on how to adopt a modern way of working together with the appropriate organisational design BUT the only way to get high performance operational delivery is through the people doing the work; this is where I shine! In my work I bring together all these components (people, process, practices and purpose) to optimise the performance of an agile system; getting it humming, delivering and releasing value often. What fuels my work is reconnecting the people in the system to their professional purpose and the outcomes the organisation seeks; this more than anything drives positive change into an organisation's processes and culture."

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Naveen Nanjundappa

Speaker

“My goal is to create an awesome working ecosystem, by coaching people on doing the right things effectively and efficiently. In everything I do, I believe in challenging the organizational processes for creating awesome products. I believe in the need for simple frameworks that build winning teams and products. Through my coaching and training sessions I inspire people to be agile.” Naveen works with leaders & teams who struggle to accomplish everything they want to in product and people development. Leaders who hire him generally understand the value of agile and are ready to learn how to build self-organizing teams and transform to effective ways of product development, but find it challenging to do it themselves, without hampering their releases.

Over the past 20+ years, Naveen followed his passion for developing products and teams, having served various organizations such as Wipro, Network Programs India ltd, Symbian, Nokia, Solutions IQ & 12 Principles Consulting. During this period working as an experienced Programmer, Test Engineer, Manager, Scrum Master, Product Manager & Coach, Naveen realized that his passion is coaching people for achieving higher effectiveness in people, process, organizational & leadership agility. He holds a Bachelors of Engineering, Masters of Science, Certified Scrum Trainer, Certified Product Manager, and Project Management Professional Certifications. He is a speaker at various Agile Conferences across India.

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Aldo
Rall

Speaker

Aldo finds joy in helping teams and organizations solving problems as a Leadership Catalyst, Change Navigator and Practicing Enterprise Agile Coach. He is keen to pragmatically developing solutions to wicked problems with others, and doing this by blending his deep skillset and experience through collaborative design, implementation, evolution, and troubleshooting unique strategies.

Aldo has practiced, mentored, coached, and consulted across various domains including value steam management, enterprise agility, leadership development, organizational and people change management, lean-agile delivery, complex adaptive systems, service design, and lean-agile governance and oversight.

Aldo has been a member of the PMI Disciplined Advisors council since its inception as well as previously a member of the DA Advisory Council before DA's acquisition by the PMI. Aldo has been an active contributor to the development of the DAVSC certification and is one of the DAVSC instructors accredited by PMI. 

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Horia Slușanschi

Speaker

My purpose is to inspire people to delight customers while claiming joy in work. I believe coaching and mentoring are about building awareness and effectiveness. In my experience, the art of creating lean and agile enterprise ecosystems requires developing a contagion of curiosity and experimentation. In this spirit, I relentlessly pursue excellence and harmony through deliberate practice in all aspects of life

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scott ambler

Speaker

Scott Ambler is the Consulting Methodologist with Ambysoft Inc., leading the evolution of the Agile Data and Agile Modeling methods. Scott is an international keynote speaker and the (co-)author of 28 books. Scott was the (co)-creator of PMI’s Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit and helps organizations around the world to improve their way of working (WoW) and ways of thinking (WoT).

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joshua
barnes

Speaker

Joshua Barnes is the founder and owner of Process Mentors, a PMI ATP and Consulting Partner. Over the past two decades, Joshua and his consultancy have had a breadth of engagements, including culture change, improved productivity and quality, and focusing on the fewest things that significantly impact people, performance, and outcomes. His superpower is helping to identify options for solving complex problems

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sohyun
kang

Speaker

SoHyun Kang is the Regional Managing Director of PMI’s Asia Pacific region. SoHyun is responsible for growing markets and delivering positive values to individuals, organizations, and societies in the Asia Pacific region.

In 2014, she joined PMI to establish the PMI Asia Pacific office in Singapore. Since then, she has led teams for chapter engagement, volunteer development, corporate engagement, channel sales, marketing & communications, and events.

With close to 20 years of experience in professional association management, SoHyun previously led the development of regional growth strategies and implementations for growing communities of MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) and ISPE (International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering) in the Asia Pacific region.

SoHyun holds a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from Korea University and graduated executive program at the National University of Singapore. She is a certified PMP (Project Management Professional) and DASM (Disciplined Agile Scrum Master). SoHyun lives in Singapore with her husband and daughter.

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tiendung (tj) le

Symposium Chair 

TJ is a dedicated professional with a strong focus on developing individuals and fostering Agile and Lean methodologies. Serving on the board of the PMI Melbourne chapter since 2019, and leading as chairperson of PMI Agile Special Interest Group for Asia Pacific since 2021, TJ demonstrates his commitment to the project management community.

TJ firmly believes in the transformative power of Agile and Lean methodologies, advocating for these approaches as tools that can enable professionals to make a meaningful impact. He is a certified DASSM and DAVSC.

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evan leybourn

Speaker

Evan has over 15 years in business leadership and a proven track record of innovation. He is the Founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute; an international membership body to both champion and support the next-generation of organisations. Companies that are agile, innovative and dynamic - perfectly designed to thrive in today’s unpredictable markets. His experience while holding senior leadership and board positions in both private industry and government has driven his work in business agility and he regularly speaks on these topics at local and international industry conferences. As well as leading the Business Agility Institute, Evan is also the author of Directing the Agile Organisation (2012) and #noprojects; a culture of continuous value (2018).

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wolfram muller

Speaker

Wolfram Müller is internationally known as a speaker, author, and expert on agile self-organized changes based on the "Theory of Constraints." As early as 1987, while studying and later as head of the PMO at 1&1 Internet AG, he discovered the fun of fast projects. Since 2006, he has made this fun, and his many years of expertise are available to others as a consultant: More than 50 companies, from start-ups to medium-sized businesses to corporations with 6,500 employees from all industries, have benefited from his knowledge and methods to date. Whether in the automotive sector, special mechanical engineering, IT, or medical technology. Companies such as Festo, Endress+Hauser, Megger, Otto Fuchs, and Bosch swear by his expertise. The results are always similar: at least +50% more projects with the same resources as well as a reduction in project lead time of 25-50% within a few weeks.

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dipesh pala

Speaker

Dipesh Pala is a thought leader in the Agile space with nearly 30 years of lived experience across a variety of industries. Over the last decade, Dipesh has led IBM’s transformation journey to grow the Agile capability from ground up across the Asia Pacific region and pursues his passion for enabling organisations of all sizes to optimise solution delivery through the pragmatic use of Agile, Lean and traditional methods.

 

Dipesh has coached over 3000 Agile practitioners and has been instrumental in rolling out Agile at scale in many organisations across multiple countries including Australia, NZ, UK, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia & China.

Dipesh is also the co-founder of two unique and exciting EdTech enterprises, where he has weaved in Agile ways of working and thinking into the DNA of these ventures. The first being Dreamcity, which offers a high-tech environment for children to try out their dream jobs in a life-like world, empowering them to be better global citizens of tomorrow. More recently, Dipesh co-founded MindFlight7 providing first of a kind virtual reality-based programs that have already helped over 30,000 high school students to make more informed decisions around their subject selection and subsequent future career direction.

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 leaders and their teams beyond the practices and principles to take a step further into their Agile journey.

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lena
ross

Speaker

Lena Ross is the co-founder of The Agile Change Leadership Institute and is sought after globally, having been invited to co-deliver the HR Leadership Summit for VMWare in Silicon Valley, USA. She recently presented a series of three sessions on Change is Changing to the Executive Digital Transformation Program audience at the Kellogg School of Management, USA. Lena’s work draws on the latest thinking in change management from areas such as design thinking, future of work, digital, hardwired human behaviour and agile mindset and approaches.

Her experience is complemented by her Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification, and she applies sound academic and business discipline to the development of practical and innovative solutions.

Lena’s first book Hacking for Agile Change: With an agile mindset, behaviours and practices was released in July 2017, followed by Change Management The Essentials published in February 2020. With Dr Jen Frahm, she co-authored the Agile Change Playbook released in August 2020.

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Galen Townson

Session Chair

Galen is a compassionate systems leader with 30 years in strategy execution and complex change programs. He leads project, planning and change practices for Department of Communities WA, and serves on the PMI Board of Directors. An agilist since 1998, he taught MBA project management, and trains DASSM and PMP. Galen’s work and studies include sustainable development, systems and design thinking, positive psychology, and coaching for business agility, lean agile ways of working, purpose, impact and wellbeing.

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