Simon Powers

Simon Powers has over 20 years’ experience helping very large organisations to thrive in the market and to be better places to work. He works with the board of directors or senior managers to transform the way that they see themselves, each other, and their organisations. The results are better organisational design, better processes, more engaged staff, and an organisation that is customer focused and more successful. He has been using Agile and Lean for the last 14 years, initially within IT, but in the last 5 years across the entire organisation.

Georg Fasching

Over the past 18 years, Georg has developed a passion and proficiency in Digital Product Development while working predominantly in the banking and engineering spaces. His experience transitioned to Agile in 2010. Having practiced as Product Owner and also as Scrum Master provides him an intriguing blend of complementing perspectives. Georg now improves the flow and happiness for people, and products, through coaching and training.

Tobias Mayer

Tobias Mayer has a background in software development, publishing, theatre arts, and community service work. Since 2004 he has worked as a change agent, trainer and facilitator, providing coaching and consulting services to teams and organizations wishing to make a transition to more agile, trustful and team-centered ways of working.

Sam Kiani

I’m a Coach & Trainer with more than 20 years’ experience of delivering change within both IT and the business, for some of the biggest Investment Banks where I reached Director level as well as entrepreneurial start-ups including my own.

Throughout my career I’ve seen that it’s not technical problems that prevent innovation, success or cause stress, rather it’s all in the way we work together and collaborate (or not).  I transitioned into the world of professional coaching back in 2017 to address exactly this problem.

I’m delighted to be working with AWA as a Coach & Trainer with our shared mission to Make Working Life Better.  How?  By helping Individuals, Teams and Leaders find their full capability, learn tools of successful collaboration and unlearn everything else that gets in the way of creativity and growth.

David Lowe

David is a coach, mentor, trainer and author. He has coached a variety of individuals and companies (ranging from start-ups to traditional organisations) over a range of industries (including wine, travel, health, fashion, government, automotive and finance). David has a post-graduate certificate in Business & Personal Coaching from University of Chester, is certified by the International Coach Federation as an Associate Certified Coach, and is one of only two people in the UK with both CSP (Certified Scrum Professional) and KCP (Kanban Coaching Professional) certificates. David is heavily involved in the Agile and Lean communities: he founded the London Agile Discussion Group, Agile on the Bench and London Lean Coffee, and speaks at conferences and events around the world.

William Strydom

William enjoys unleashing the higher potential of people, teams and organisations through coaching. As a Co-Active and ORSC Certified Coach, William focusses on leadership development and agile coaching. He also enjoys assisting organisations and teams with their transition to agility through gaining an agile mindset and the accompanying practices. William is an ICF Certified Professional Coach (ACC), ICAgile Authorised Trainer and a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC). He holds various agile certifications from ICAgile, Scrum Alliance, Scaled Academy, and the Project Management Institute, to name a few.

Matthew Dodwell

Matthew is a professional coach and leadership trainer with over 25 years’ experience helping companies change and build high performance teams. He brings extensive coaching knowledge together with a strong technical background and is passionate about making working life better. Matthew’s approach is underpinned by several highly effective methods including clean language, systemic modelling and leadership embodiment. By first focusing on culture Matthew helps his teams create the kind of results needed with ‘agile’. Matthew is an ICAgile Authorised Trainer, a Certified Clean Language coach and a Leadership Embodiment coach and trainer.

Rafa Ribeiro

After working as a Software Developer for 11 years, Rafa Ribeiro realised that despite the knowledge he had about machines and computers, he lacked skills to empower and support other people. With the challenge of creating his own company, he felt the need to start a learning journey into the realms of Psychology, Expressive Arts and Professional Coaching. As a result of this mixture, Rafa currently works as an Agile Coach and Professional Coach with organisations, teams, and individuals, helping them discover and becoming aware of their goals, reflecting their behaviours and supporting their growth. He has a range of deep experience working with co-located, distributed and full remote teams, as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach or Enterprise Agile Coach.

Antoinette Coetzee

Antoinette was one of the first people in South Africa to start using Agile in 1996. Coming from a technical background Antoinette had for many years worked as a team member in Agile vendor teams across the world.  At the heart of what Antoinette does is the desire to develop people, be that as individuals, as members of teams, or as leaders. Agile and Lean bring about major shifts in the way people view work. She loves supporting teams and organisations through that difficult change to watch them flourish on the other side.  Antoinette is a professional coach, trainer and facilitator specialising in change management and enterprise transformation.

Ben Maynard

Ben has coached, trained and been passionate about people, customer focus, collaboration and iterative of delivery of value since 2009. Having historically worked on banking regulatory deliveries he is now broadening his horizons and is involved with a number of technical and non-technical distributed and co-located teams as well as driving the growth of Deutsche’s Agile community. I have a degree in Computing and Business, Dissertation was to design, build and test a working system, I did so using an SSADM and TDD (In hindsight I agree, absolute madness) Ben is now at Deutsche Bank fighting the good fight and helping to create safe, happy and meaningful environments.

Ian Rees

Ian is a Lean/Agile Coach working for AWA with many years’ experience of applying and coaching Agile and Lean principles. Since leaving the UK product company, BM solutions that he co-founded in 2002, he has coached on large scale Agile transformation programmes at Aviva, American Express and RBS. He is a certified TBR trainer (Training from the Back of the Room) and has delivered 1000+ hours training in the UK and Europe on Leadership, Scaled Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and many more for clients including Aviva, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, American Express, Deloitte and Epicor.

Philiy Lander

Philiy has worked extensively with teams and leaders across multiple industries. She is an Agile Coach working with the team leading an agile transition at a global organisation of 20,000+and was part of the team that created our Agile Coaching and Facilitation classes. Philiy is a CSP, Barefoot Personal & Business Coaching Graduate, International Coaching Federation Member and is currently working on her thesis for an MA in Personal & Business coaching. Philiy is also part of the Training from the back of the room Certified Trainer Team.

Michael Sahota

Michael Sahota, Thought Leader, Enterprise Coach, Author and Trainer, guides executive leaders to create high-performance organizations. He has a proven practical playbook for leading change. His model for Consciously Approaching Agile™ explores the creation of a cultural and leadership context where Agile creates lasting organizational results.

Craig Larman

Craig Larman is the co-creator of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and since 2005 has worked with clients to apply the LeSS framework for scaling Scrum, lean thinking, and agile development to big product groups. Much of his work is organizational-design consulting with senior-management teams of product groups adopting LeSS.

Michael Hamman

For most of the past 25 years, I have committed myself to the possibility that the workplace be a site for personal, professional and social transformation. Trained early on in coaching and large group facilitation with Werner Erhard and Associates, I went on to train in systems thinking, facilitation, organization development, and leadership development with Peter Senge, Peter Block, Thomas Leonard, Otto Laske, Marvin Weisbord, and with the Leadership Circle. For 12 years I developed software, and coached and trained software teams in the beauty of design and teamwork.

Evelyn Tian

Evelyn Tian is a professional Lean and Agile Coach and Trainer. She has over 20 years of product development experience in telecom products, automotive industry, financial sectors and e-commerce products, with wide range of experience from product management, project management, system architect, software development, system integration to customer support.

Andy Spence

Andy’s work experience includes stints as an application support engineer, scrum master and agile coach. He has honed his craft of helping others grow with agility for over 10 years, coaching at all levels from small start-ups, medium enterprises through to CxO level for large financial institutions.

In a more unusual path to agility, Andy’s background has spanned multiple professions from working in the service industry, IT Helpdesk, band management and broadcasting. This myriad of professions has helped him develop a real understanding of working with not just various people, but different approaches to achieve success in teams. His foundations as scrum master in late 2008 naturally came from working with development teams but soon evolved into working with the wider business where he has now worked for almost 5 years.

While working at Barclays Bank, Andy helped Internal Audit with agile coaching support. He drew on his years of experience with kanban and scrum and grew this into the transformation of the profession of Internal Audit. Andy founded the Agile In Audit MeetUp and is currently co-director for Agile In Audit LTD providing coaching, speaking and training to professionals in the industry.

Dan Brown

Dan is Kanban and Agile Coach and Teacher. He has worked with clients such as Ministry of Justice, Barclays, Government Digital Service, ASOS, YouView TV, Pancentric Digital, Disney, BSkyB, Avantia, Satellite Applications Catapult, Mandara Captial, Macmillan Cancer Support, Miranda, RDT and the BBC. Dan presents at Kanban conferences around Europe, and helps run the Kanban Coaching Exchange in London – a free to attend monthly meetup to hear kanban related talks and talk to other practitioners and coaches.

Scott Ambler

Scott W. 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.

Don Reinertsen

In the field of organisational change and scaling agile he hardly needs introducing. Don has worked with leading product development organizations for over 35 years and taught executive courses at Caltech for 14 years.

• The scaled agile framework’s 1st, 6th, 7th and 9th principles are based on his work with quotes on most of the SAFe web pages taken directly from Don’s work.
• Large Scale Scrum’s Queuing Theory is based on Don’s work; he is quoted numerous times on the LeSS website.

Philiy Lander

Philiy has worked extensively with teams and leaders across multiple industries. She is an Agile Coach working with the team leading an agile transition at a global organisation of 20,000+and was part of the team that created our Agile Coaching and Facilitation classes. Philiy is a CSP, Barefoot Personal & Business Coaching Graduate, International Coaching Federation Member and is currently working on her thesis for an MA in Personal & Business coaching. Philiy is also part of the Training from the back of the room Certified Trainer Team.

Lyssa Adkins

Since 2004, Lyssa has taught Scrum and Agile Coaching to well over a thousand students, coached many agile teams, and served as master coach to scores of apprentice coaches.

In both one-on-one settings and small groups, she enjoys a front-row seat as remarkable agile coaches emerge and go on to entice the very best from the teams and organizations they coach.

Michael Spayd

In a word, my professional work is about transformation. I have found that I am wired to help people–and systems–change. I am drawn to cutting edge ‘technologies’ for coaching and developing organizations, leaders and teams. As an organizational change coach and consultant for 20 plus years, I have worked with Fortune 1000, small businesses and non-profits. For 13 years I have specialized in large-scale Agile transformation, working with numerous organizations, leaders, and scores of teams.

Ahmad Fahmy

Dr Alistair Cockburn

An author of the Agile Manifesto. In “The All- Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes”.

Internationally renowned strategist, author of the Jolt award-winning Agile Software Development and Writing Effective Use Cases, he co-created the Agile Manifesto, the Declaration of Interdepen-dence, the Agile Project Leadership Network and the International Consortium for Agile. Dr. Cockburn is an expert on agile development, project management, process design, use cases, and object-oriented development. Find his articles, talks, poems and other writings at http://alistair.cockburn.us

Bas Vodde

Bas Vodde is the co-creator of Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), is a coach, consultant, programmer, trainer, and author related to modern agile and lean product development.

When he coaches organizations, he works on three levels: organizational, team, individual/technical practices. He has trained thousands of people in software development, Scrum, and modern agile practices for over a decade.

Dan North

Dan North uses his deep technical and organisational knowledge to help CIOs, business and software teams to deliver quickly and successfully. He puts people first and finds simple, pragmatic solutions to business and technical problems, often using lean and agile techniques.With over twenty years of experience in IT, Dan is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide. The originator of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Deliberate Discovery, Dan has published feature articles in numerous software and business publications, and contributed to The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends and 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts. He occasionally blogs here.

Sharon Bowman

Sharon Bowman is the president of Bowperson Publishing & Training, Inc. She has been a professional speaker, author, teacher, and trainer for over forty years. She works with businesses and educational institutions that want to offer exceptional in-house training and professional development programs.

Sharon is the author of seven popular training books, including the best-selling Pfeiffer/Wiley books titled The Ten-Minute Trainer and Training from the BACK of the Room. Her newest book is Using Brain Science to Make Training Stick. Log onto Sharon’s website at www.Bowperson.com for free excerpts of her books and downloadable training tips, articles, and slide presentations.

Sharon’s two-day train-the-trainer program, “Training from the BACK of the Room,” has received global acclaim from consulting and training companies worldwide. Sharon practices what she preaches by creating/presenting highly-interactive, informative, and unforgettable learning experiences that are based on Accelerated Learning processes and principles. Join us for this exciting train-the-trainer event and take your own training skills to a dramatically new level of excellence.