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Speakers

Colm Harrington (Dell/EMC)
Colm is a Software Design Engineer with DellEMC, the leaders in converged and hyper-converged technologies. He is based in Cork, Ireland with responsibilities for software design and process improvement. He has worked in the software industry, with various companies including Microsoft and Sage, for over 12 years. He has a real passion for leveraging automation to improve product quality and the development experience. https://www.linkedin.com/in/colmharrington/
Magda Targosz (AA)
Magda is a Product Optimisation and Development professional with over 10 years of experience in various industries.Magda started her career as a Business Analyst, then transitioned into Project Management to finally discover her passion for optimising existing Products and creating brand new. Magda worked in companies like AIB, Dell and then in Ryanair, where her responsibility was to drive multiple Agile teams to deliver and optimise the new Ryanair website using Agile. She used Insights and User Experience Testing to understand which products the customers want. Currently Magda works as Product Owner in the AA Ireland where she is focused on driving business change through introducing User Testing and Data driven optimisation to improve User Experience and also on optimising conversion on all the products that she manages. Magda is a Certified PO, Certified Project Management Professional and she is also in her second year of the Trinity MBA.
Rob Healy (Ammeon)
Rob is a Lean, Agile and DevOps Consultant at Ammeon where he advises companies how to accelerate the delivery of software-enabled products and services. A career encompassing Development, Engineering, Testing and Product Management roles has provided Rob keen insight into the real-world challenges facing organizations today. Rob is an active leader in the Irish Agile community and holds an MBA from London School of Business and Finance.
Feargus McCauley (Allstate)
Sr Manager with Allstate, based in Belfast with responsibility for Billing and Payments modernization. He has had a varied career covering many roles from engineering to management and is passionate about creating software which solves real world business problems with an excellent customer experience.
Gillian Spence (Allstate)
Product Manager with Allstate in Belfast. Gillian has had a fulfilling career primarily in Business Analyst roles and moved to product management 2 years ago and has been a driving force in the company’s transformation to a product focused organization.
Nick Power (Fleetmatics)
Nick Power is the Chief Architect for Fleetmatics, a Verizon Company. Responsible for all enterprise architecture across the Fleetmatics platform and product line. Nick is also the engineering leader for the core of the platform which comprises of engineering teams in IoT, CI\CD & Security. Nick has 21 years’ experience in the software industry working across Finance, e-Learning and IoT in a number of management and architecture roles
Sarah Wilson (AXA)
Head of Digital for AXA Ireland, has worked in the insurance industry for over ten years - in both Marketing and Digital. Sarah and her team strive to think customer and digital first and have recently moved to using Agile to deliver a lot of their changes across AXA.ie and AXANI.co.uk.
Paul Hayes (AXA)
Paul is an Agile Lean Product Development Consultant, helping guide AXA Ireland through their agile transition. He worked in Paddy Power for nine years in a number of product development roles, and during that time he successfully led the adoption of Scrum across twelve teams. He has worked in technology and product roles in gaming, travel, financial services and government over the last 19 years, with particular focus on helping business and technology teams work together better.
Colm O’hEocha (AgileInnovation)
With nearly 30 years in software development, Colm has been applying agile and lean approaches for 15 of those. As a trainer, coach and consultant, he has supported large scale lean/agile adoptions in over 40 organisations across ICT, Finance and Telecoms. Colm is founder and principle of AgileInnovation – his company name reflects his research into the interplay of agile and lean development approaches with product and process innovation. Colm has extensive hands-on experience of agile in the development of enterprise systems, embedded software, and high-innovation research environments. His training includes Agile/Lean for Executives, ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Portfolio Management and Lean/Kanban software development. He supports companies adopting these methods through assessments, consulting and team coaching. See www.agileinnovation.ie or details of training, services and past customer engagements.
Fran O'Hara (Inspire Quality Services)
Fran is the founder and principal of Inspire Quality Services. He consults with local and international organisations on agile/lean and quality/testing and is a regular presenter at international conferences and seminars. Fran provides agile/lean coaching, training and consulting to organisations transitioning to agile. Fran also co-founded and grew a successful testing services organisation, Insight Test Services. He is co-organiser of Agile Tour Ireland and a co-founder of the Irish SIG in Software Testing - SoftTest. His tutorial, ‘Metamorphosis – Moving to Agile and Staying Agile’, was voted best tutorial at EuroSTAR 2016 in Stockholm.
Lucia Marconi (Overstock)
With lots of experience in the software industry, I’m committed to delivering the correct software in the smartest way. A believer in ‘agile’ I’m focussed on always finding better and smarter ways to do this. I love my work and am committed to balancing this with a fulfilled and healthy life …agile at work and at play!
David Denham (Workday)
David Denham is a Scrum Master and Kanban Coach at Workday. He has coached and trained many different types of Agile teams over the past 4 years, and has also pioneered approaches to Lean UX, Product Discovery and #NoEstimates with his teams. David is one of the co-founders of the Agile-Lean Ireland meetup group. He is one of the leading voices on Kanban in Ireland, and believes in the power of immersive learning experiences to help spread learning in Kanban.
Hugh O’Donoghue (DING)
Hugh O’Donoghue is CTO at Ding. With over 20 year’s experience in technology, he has worked in a variety of roles and locations, from co-founder of a successful start-up to VP of Engineering at a large US high-tech company. Over the past three years at Ding Hugh has been busy working with a great team of people to build the world’s best mobile top up service that is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Joanna Koprowicz (Travelport Digital)
I have a Masters in Project Management and straight after college I worked in a typical waterfall environment. Although, once introduced to Agile, I immediately fell in love with it. Agile felt right from the beginning. I am passionate about helping teams grow and improve – to deliver work on the next level and helping organisations by creating sustainable, highly-efficient teams. I also strongly believe in continuous learning and improvement.
Mary Walshe (Aviva)
Mary Walshe is an Agile coach in Aviva. She helps teams deliver valuable solutions to customer problems. She promotes a kaizen culture and lean methods in the teams she coaches. Mary's background is in the social sciences and has coached teams in different industries with varying cultural challenges.
Aidan Casey (Wavebreak Media)
Aidan Casey is the Chief Technology Officer at Wavebreak Media where he leads the development of DesignWizard, the company’s online graphic design software. As CTO he is not only responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, he helps shape the company’s culture through lean and agile principles. He believes strongly that the first step to creating highly effective teams is building trust. Aidan has over 15 years experience working with leading global brands performing leadership roles in agile transformation, architecture and software delivery. He is an international speaker and recognised by Microsoft as a Microsoft Azure MVP as a reflection of his cloud computing expertise, a willingness to share it and his community leadership.
Vincent Pretre (Hiptest)
With a 10+ years experience, Vincent Pretre is a co-founder of Hiptest. He is specialized in web-development and is also the creator and main contributor of the open source framework Hiptest-Publi sher. He has been speaker in several conferences around the world to share his experience about testing and behavior driven development.
Michelle Almeida
Michelle is a passionate advocate for Agile, working predominately with Scrum teams, at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, to help them create great digital educational products. As a Facilitator, Trainer and Coach she helps individuals and teams achieve their goals and deliver value. Michelle has championed “Putting the Fun back into Scrumming” through delivery of workshops and interactive training sessions. Michelle aims to inspire people to learn by doing and motivate them to change one thing when they return back to their Teams. Michelle previously worked at Ericsson, and has delivered workshops and training internationally including Austin, Boston, Stockholm, Sydney and Dublin.
Andrea Baker (AIB)
Andrea Baker is an experienced senior agile practitioner with extensive experience as a scrummaster, Kanban coach as well as a senior business analyst on development projects; coaching & mentoring. Andrea is motivated by people & by change. Working with teams to create a continuous improvement environment, ensuring people are at the core of agile adoption.
John Paul Howe (HMH)
JP has been working in software development for over 13 years and is still learning and levelling up. He has worked across a wide variety of ‘non-coder’ roles - BA/Scrum master/Project Manager/Program manager and is now working as a Delivery Lead in HMH.
Elaine Wilson (HMH)
Elaine is a graduate of Computer Science but the majority of her 14 years working in software development have been spent in planning and delivery related roles. Her focus and aim is to help teams realise their potential and do the best work that they can. Elaine currently works as a Delivery Lead in HMH.
Alina Amir-Qureshi (Symantec)
I started my IT journey in 1990 with post graduation program in management information systems . Early coding days using basic , pascal and Cobol and then C++ . It was short as I moved into networking that would be Novell ! I loved putting systems together and updating them so few years were spent in hardware world. Later on moved into Academia as Computer Science lecturer. Then went to Canada for my BSC in CS during my stay worked in computer labs on campus as Lab assistant because of my hardware and networking experience. Then moved into phone support. Love brought me to Ireland. Joined MSC in IT and education at Trinity graduated with post graduation diploma after my taking up the role of a mother :) . Later on joined Microsoft as a trainer. Moved to Symantec as certification specialist for Norton. In 2013 got was introduced to the world of agility . 2014 became part of a scrum team and an apprentice to all of our SM's. 2016 full time SM. Between 2012 and present I completed my green and black belt in lean sigma , became a qualified business and life coach, a facilitator and Master trainer.
Frederic Oehl (Storyful)
Frederic started his career as a Software Engineer in small French startup and that’s where, in 2006, he discovered eXtreme Programming and Scrum. Since then he has a passion for Scrum and for enabling people to reach their potential. In each subsequent role, he’s been helping teams/ organizations in their agile transformation. This includes training and coaching teams, managers and executives. He’s currently working as a Scrum Master for Storyful where he’s coaching the product team.