Michael McCullough, Technical Director, Quadrus Development Inc.
Janette Scott, Project Manager, City of Calgary
Robyn Johnson, Management Systems Analyst, The City of Calgary

Michael McCullough is a Technical Director with Quadrus Development Inc., an IT consulting and services company based out of Calgary, Alberta. As one of Quadrus’ thought leaders in Agile concepts, Michael plays a leading role in assisting Quadrus’ clients in the quick and practical adoption of agile paradigms and techniques through the application of Quadrus’ Agile Jumpstart methodology; an approach that integrates formal classroom training with on-site mentoring and ad-hoc coaching to teach, practice and apply agile techniques to real project delivery.

Over the past 5 years, Michael has been helping fortune 500 companies in the United States and leading organizations here in Canada to understand, integrate and adopt Agile techniques in both project management and software development. In addition to his focus on Agile development, Michael has a background and experience in software development and project management.

Robyn Johnson is a Management Systems Analyst in the The City of Calgary's IT Program Management Office. Robyn has been actively involved in project management and application development methodolgy since 2002. Her interest in Agile in Calgary started with a course on SCRUM, and ever since it has been her goal to introduce Agile to The City.

Janette Scott is a Project Manager in Application Development with The City of Calgary. Janette is currently leading the Agile Evaluation project that was started in late 2007. She has an extensive background in software development and project management at The City of Calgary.

Mike Griffiths, Independent Consultant at Leading Answers

Mike Griffiths is actively involved in the agile methods community. He serves on the board of the Agile Alliance and the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN). He presents and writes on agile project management for a variety of conferences and journals. Mike helped create DSDM in 1994 and have been using agile methods (DSDM, Scrum, FDD, XP) for the last 14 years.

Mike is also active in the traditional project management world. He was a contributor to the current PMBOK v3 Guide and teaches for the PMI SeminarsWorld training program. Mike presented on agile project management at the PMI Global Congress conferences 2004, 2006, and 2007.

Gerard Meszaros, Chief Scientist
ClearStream Consulting

Gerard Meszaros is a Calgary-based consultant specializing is agile development processes. He is a frequent speaker and tutorial presenter at major international conferences on topics ranging from "Right-sizing User Stories" and "Adding Usability Testing to Agile Projects" to "xUnit Test Patterns and Smells." He is the author of the Jolt Award finalist book "xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code" published by Addison Wesley Professional in the Martin Fowler Signature Series.

Jane Robarts, Senior Consultant/Project Manager
ThoughtWorks

Jane is a senior consultant and project manager with ThoughtWorks. She has worked on agile projects in India, China, the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. Jane has spent a lot of the last several years working directly on distributed agile delivery projects or coaching distributed teams. Jane's current role involves her working with the ThoughtWorks project portfolio to improve collaboration between teams and consistency of project delivery.

Janice Aston and Mike Griffiths

Janice Aston has over 16 years of project management experience with an emphasis on delivering business value. She is passionate about building high performing teams focused on continuous improvement. Janice has a proven track record delivering on project commitments with a heart for leadership and people. She has recently founded Agile Perspective Inc. specializing in creative collaboration.
Mike Griffiths is an independent project manager and trainer with over 20 years of IT experience. He is active in both the agile and traditional project management communities and serves on the board of the APLN & Agile Alliance, and teaches courses for the PMI. Mike founded the Calgary chapter of the APLN in 2006 and maintains the Agile Leadership site www.LeadingAnswers.com.

Gerard Meszaros, Chief Scientist, ClearStream Consulting

Gerard Meszaros, Chief Scientist, ClearStream Consulting

Gerard Meszaros is Chief Scientist at ClearStream Consulting, a Calgary-based consulting company specializing is agile development processes. He is typically involved in the early parts of projects where the project scope and development process are first decided. This includes envisioning the finished product, designing the product for fitness-for-purpose and usability, deciding on an appropriate release strategy, and determining how the project will be managed and measured. His book xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code is due in bookstores by the end of May 2007.

Ross Martin & Lynn Harrison, Black Tusk Leadership

Ross Martin, CPCC
Black Tusk Leadership

Ross Martin is the Calgary partner for Black Tusk Leadership Inc. His own leadership was built on a successful track record of 20 years experience in senior leadership positions in large multinational and small local companies. That background gives him a very personal understanding of both the challenges and pressures experienced by leaders at all levels of an organization.

Ross spent the beginning of his career first achieving his professional accounting designation and then becoming the CFO of a large multi-national company. During this time he also led experiential leadership and management workshops for six years in the CMA Professional Program. He is a graduate of the Banff School of Advanced Management, an accredited graduate from the Coaches Training Institute (Certified Professional Co-Active Coach) a member of the International Coaching Federation and a Past President of the Calgary Association of Professional Coaches.

Ross’ work over the last 10 years has focused in two main areas: one-on-one executive coaching and the coaching and development of leadership teams. The goal in both cases is to support the development of leadership excellence and the creation of work environments that enable and encourage excellence from everyone in the organization.

Lynn Harrison, MA ABS, CPCC
Black Tusk Leadership

Lynn Harrison is the principal of Black Tusk Leadership Inc. in British Columbia. An executive coach with over 20 years experience in management/consulting, her background includes co-founding an international, publicly held franchise organization, leading at the senior management level and providing consulting services to a wide range of organizations in both the private and public sectors.

Prior to forming her consulting business in 1992, Lynn was Vice President, Client Services for the Atheneum Learning Corporation, a division of Priority Management Systems International, which specializes in time management tools, team building, strategic planning and change management. She was winner of the BIV “40 Under 40” award for her entrepreneurship. Between 1982 and 1987, she managed the corporate training and wellness program at the Workers’ Compensation Board of B.C.

Lynn has a Masters Degree in Applied Behavioral Science (Management & Consulting) from L.I.O.S. at Bastyr University and is certified as a professional coach through the International Coaching Federation. Her training includes advanced ontological coaching through the Newfield Network. Her undergraduate degree (B.A.) is from the University of British Columbia. Lynn is qualified to use various psychometric and 360 leadership instruments, including the Myers-Briggs, EQi, Firo-B and Strength Deployment Inventory. She is the former chair of Justice Institute of B.C. and is active in her local coaching community.

You can learn more about Ross, Lynn and Black Tusk at www.blacktuskleadership.com.

Robin Robinson, Principal Consultant
RCR Consulting

Robin Robinson brings more than 20 years of experience to organizational consulting including, involvement in organizations with both large and small scale systems change projects. Robin is an accredited Insights Discovery facilitator and an EQ-i (Emotional Intelligence) practitioner.

Mike Griffiths, Senior Technical Director
Quadrus Development Inc.

Mike Griffiths is a project manager for Quadrus Development Inc. He helped create DSDM in 1994 and has been using agile methods ever since; he is active in the agile community and has authored numerous journal articles. Mike serves on the board of the Agile Alliance and the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and is a frequent contributor to agile conferences.

Rob Morris, Principal Software Engineer
CDL Software

Rob is the principal software engineer at CDL Systems and has over 20 years experience developing software systems. His more recent work has involved overseeing the development of control station software used to fly unmanned aerial vehicles currently operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rob has a BSc. in Electrical Engineering and Masters degrees in Computer Science and Software Engineering. He has embraced Agile techniques and tries to shoehorn them into the more document centric military projects at every opportunity. He is also a certified ScrumMaster.