BIO

Ken Rubin was the first managing director of the worldwide Scrum Alliance. He is the author of the Amazon #1 best-selling book Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. He is also the creator of the Visual AGILExicon, a freely available set of vibrant, four-color icons for composing graphically rich and visually appealing three dimensional representations of agile and Scrum concepts.

Ken is the Managing Principal at Innolution, a company that provides Scrum and agile training and coaching to help companies develop products in an effective and economically sensible way. A Certified Scrum Trainer, Ken has trained over 22,000 people on agile and Scrum, Kanban, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects, and transition management. He has coached over 200 companies, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 10.

Ken is a keynote speaker in the major conferences, includingScrum Alliance's global gathering in 2014, and featured as an Agile "Stalwart" in Agile Alliance's Agile2014

Book signing Announcement:

BIO

Licenia Rojas is Vice President of Technology at American Express, leading the Delivery Transformation Program. In this role, Licenia is responsible for establishing a new, best-in-class technology delivery model for American Express. The Delivery Transformation Program is a multi-year, strategic initiative that cuts across three strategic pillars: organization and operating model; skills and roles; and tools and processes. It is driving faster time to market, higher productivity, reduced costs and higher-quality delivery, with increasing speed to innovation.
Licenia joined the company in August 1998 as a Lead Architect. She was named Chief Architect in 2004 for the Consumer and OPEN Technology organization. Licenia was promoted in 2007 to Chief Architect for Consumer, OPEN, World Service, and Interactive Technology. In 2011, Licenia assumed the role of Vice President of Risk Technologies, then was promoted in 2012 to Vice President of Risk and Global Card Member Remittance Technology, where she was responsible for mission-critical platforms that support Credit Authorizations, Card Member Remittances, Risk Assessment, Fraud, New Accounts, Customer Privacy, Customer Information, Underwriting, Collections, Cryptography, Credit Bureau Reporting, ATM and Customer Research & Development across all business units. She assumed her current responsibilities in September 2013.

Licenia is also the Senior Technology Leader in South Florida and is a member of the South Florida Senior Leadership Team, which spans all American Express business units operating in the region. Licenia leads a team of local leaders to drive a culture across the campus that is focused on a growth mindset, collaboration and innovation. She also serves as the sponsor for several employee events and diversity networks promoting the company's Blue Box Values. In addition to her local leadership responsibilities, Licenia serves as the Global Development Committee Chair for the Women in Technology network at American Express.
Licenia holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from Barry University. She and her husband, Tony, live in Miami with their three children.

BIO

Having worked with over 30 release train-sized groups and thousands of Agile practitioners, Eric Willeke has helped to guide leaders in America's biggest IT organizations as they adopt new approaches and mindsets to optimize their technology investments. Eric is an experienced transformation consultant with expertise in guiding large organizations through their complex Agile adoption and transformation efforts and helping them build capability to sustainably and successfully deliver on the needs of their business. He is passionate about unleashing better results and guiding leadership to better techniques and approaches to enable organizations to flourish. For more than a decade, his personal vision statement, “Helping everybody on a project sleep better at night,” has shaped his passion for continuous improvement and unlocking human potential.

Since joining Rally, Eric has worked with a broad range of Fortune 500 companies in the technology, media, insurance, financial services, and healthcare industries. As both an individual consultant and leader of a Rally coaching team, his work includes advising executives, facilitating planning meetings and release train formation, identifying and mitigating adoption risks, helping enterprises train internal coaches, teaching SAFe and Kanban training classes, and guiding and mentoring other Rally coaches. Eric is one of 25 non-SAI consultants to be certified as a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), the highest level of certification provided by Scale Agile (SAI). Additionally, he has earned SPC, AKT, KCP, CSP, and CSM certifications, as well as various technical certifications, throughout his career. Eric also serves on the program committee for the Agile 201x conference series, was the lead editor for the Proceedings of the LSSC conference series, and speaks frequently at conferences around the world. In this session, Eric will teach you to rebuild human social networks to destroy silos and create conditions where business agility can take root and flourish.

BIO

Alex Kanaan (SA, CSM, CSPO) is co-founder of SFAA, and conference chair of ATS 2014 & 2015. 20 years in technology, Alex headed application development at the UN, technology transformation in Accenture, and business architecture in Microsoft-Avanade and is currently Director of Project Management at Spafinders. As a convert from Waterfall, Alex understands the challenges, and is a driving force behind spreading Agile awareness in local communities. Alex introduced SFAA's highly successful Evening with a Guru Series, and chaired the Agile track in IT Palooza 2015.

He presented Agile classes and conference topics both locally and nationally, most recently at the global Scrum Gathering 2015. Alex asks you to join him to see Agile as a trigger for innovation beyond software development.