Opening Keynote Speaker - Day 1

William Miller is SVP and CIO at NetApp, responsible for business application solution management and delivery across NetApp. Working closely with his peers, his focus is on end-to-end planning, execution and delivery of business capabilities.  Bill and his organization enable and accelerate operational excellence and process efficiencies through productivity tools and technology solutions, while also proactively managing enterprise-wide security for NetApp’s intellectual property and data. In addition, Bill is responsible for accelerating adoption of and showcasing NetApp’s own use cases for NetApp technologies and solutions via the NetApp on NetApp and Customer-1 programs.

Bill brings to NetApp an extensive background in providing technology-centered leadership and global business solutions to large technology companies. He has previously led world-class IT organizations focused on delivering value by leveraging cloud computing applications and partners to maintain low-spend profiles for best-in-class efficiencies.

Opening Keynote Speaker - Day 2

Suraj Rao leads the Digital Analytics Office at Western Digital Corporation to deliver enterprise-wide analytics solutions for business value. His office uses advanced analytic methods and Industry 4.0 technologies to solve tough factory and customer problems. These solutions are developed in agile style Rapid Learning Cycles and delivered into production environment. The solutions span diverse applications: Predictive maintenance for equipment uptime, Image analysis for fault detection, Digital Twins for factory optimization, Routing solutions Autonomous robots, Telemetry analytic for Fleet management of assets, etc.

Prior to joining WDC, at IBM and PDF Solutions, he led yield improvement solutions in the Semiconductors and Industrial Products practice. He engaged with global clients such as TSMC, Toshiba, Sony, Freescale, Lam Research, Kennametals, Novelis, and Renesas among others.

Suraj holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a B.Sc. from Indian Institute of Technology (KGP).

Sasi Panda, PMP, PMI-ACP, SASM, POPM is a Senior Engineering Program Manager, managing the packet networking group's Agile Software development at Ciena since 2016. Before joining Ciena, Sasi has worked as Program Manager and Test Manager at Cisco, Ericsson and Calix since the mid-90s. As the Agile PM at Ciena, Sasi trains and coaches his scrum teams, scrum masters and product owners in the successful delivery of customer needs on time and with quality. Sasi has a Masters in Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. 

Clay Couger is a Senior Engineering Program Manager, managing packet networking group’s customer requirements and critical customer accounts. Clay has worked at both Ciena and Cisco since 2000 in various roles program managing SW and HW engineering projects, SW release management, tool development for KPI (Key Performance Index), process guru and head of a project management office. As a PM at Ciena, Clay's current role is working with product marketing, technical matter experts, R&D, and account teams to define project scope and ensure customer use case and requirements are available at the beginning of project cycles. Clay works with key accounts managing SW releases to support tier 1 service providers lab trials and deployment. Clay also develops and supports inhouse tooling for Agile and SW quality reports. Clay has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Computer Technology at Oklahoma State University.

Indubala Kachhawaa is a PMP, Prince2 Practitioner, Toastmaster, passionate blogger, and French language tutor.  She is President of Talkers@Cisco Toastmasters International and the Area Director Toastmasters (Area 15). She is an active member of NCPMI (North Carolina Project Management Group).  She was the First Prize winner in Prepared Speech competitions at Club, Area and District Levels. She is a First Prize winner in Impromptu Speech competitions at Club,  Area and District Levels. She holds Prince2 (Foundation and Practitioner) and ITIL certificates along with Scrum and DevOps. She will be a speaker at the March 2021 Leadership CoP of NCPMI.  She has 10 years of industry experience in operations, production support and release management.

Prakash Bettadapur is the CEO of ArchTech Agile Solutions Inc. and works with startups and large organizations as an Agile Evangelist and a Consultant. He is also a Leadership Coach and Trainer, Business Agility Coach and Startups Advisor. Prakash worked with Cisco Systems in various leadership roles and was also responsible for Agile transformations for many divisions. With business certification programs in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Leadership from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Prakash works with many startups as Advisor and Leadership Coach. He is a regular speaker at many conferences and meetups, sharing his thoughts on Agile, Leadership and Innovation.

As executive consultant for the Englund Project Management Consultancy, Randall L. Englund provides management and leadership development at a systemic level through his multimedia presentations, workshops, seminars, consulting engagements, books, conference papers, blogs and other writings, applying an interactive style for effective communicating and sharing. He teaches leadership and management for graduate certificates online at Northeastern University, leads PMI SeminarsWorld, and provides tailored consulting world-wide. His experiences stem from 22 years at Hewlett-Packard, where he was a senior project manager in a corporate Project Management Initiative. He also served as a program manager in high tech new product development, a field installation supervisor, and a military maintenance officer. PMI honored Randy with the Distinguished Contributions Award for his body of work and the PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Award of Excellence. He co-authored nine business management books.

Brian Levy is the President of BridgePort Digital, an organizational optimization firm specializing in the validation of the strategic approach via verification of strategic execution to the organizational strategy via metric management and appropriate alignment. While others in the industry have avoided metrics, Brian has been able to consistently improve productivity by over 30% within 6 months of operation verified with predefined metrics. He’s accomplished this through coaching executives through strategic planning and the pioneering techniques of Portfolio Management. As an avid fan of continuous improvement, Brian often takes the time to engage in executive coaching personally in order to learn new skills to transfer to his employees. However, his real joy is in putting his Scrum@Scale Trainer status to use in the classroom and training others in the techniques which lead to organizational optimization. That joy is most often utilized via training underrepresented minorities in careers related to software development and using his 8-year old daughter to explain Management by Acceptance concepts.

Gopal Renganathan has more than twenty years of experience as a Transformational and Program Management Leader in Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Dell-EMC, Verizon, and AutoZone as well as in startups. Gopal also ran a successful services company. Gopal’s global experience comes from being in leadership positions for companies in the US, India and China. He has an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill as well as an M.S in Computer Science.

Gopal is currently the head of Portfolio and Program Management and Agile Delivery for the biggest real estate tech company where he is working to create big data and AI/ML tools to augment the intelligence of brokers, agents, and franchises.

Previous Speaking Experience:

• Presenter at ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analyst global conference for many years (2011, 2012, 2013)
• Active Speaker in the South Florida PMI Chapter
• Active Speaker in multiple meetups
• Speaker at Enterprise Agile meetup in San Francisco and co-chair of Enterprise Agile Meetup