Mark Richards
SAFe Fellow
Mark’s contribution to Scaling Agile in complex organizations is almost unparalleled. He has worked with numerous Enterprise customers across most industries both here in Australia and across the globe. Mark’s expertise and results are anchored in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), but are strengthened by his passion, depth of knowledge and his unique outcomes focused facilitation style.
Since attending the inaugural SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) course in 2012, Mark has gone on to became the first person worldwide to achieve the highest level of SAFe certification (SPCT) in 2014. He continues to develop value-adding techniques and advancements and was recently recognized as a SAFe Contributor for his work with program-level metrics. In 2017, he became one of only 9 people to be recognised world-wide as a SAFe Fellow.
Whilst Mark is known for his ability to move seamlessly from a deeply technical discussion about DevOps pipelines and tooling to another about strategic initiatives and portfolio governance, at heart he is the Coaches’ Coach. He knows the true essence of great facilitation and is happiest as he helps clients develop their problem solving and continuous improvement skills to leave lasting and sustainable change.
A frequent presenter at conferences and meetups both locally and internationally, Mark is also the author of the blog “The Art of SAFe” and working on a book of the same name.
Karina Woolmer
SAFe Program Consultant
Karina has spent close to 20 years in the Learning and Development field, both creating and facilitating training programs. For the past four years, she was an integral part of Telstra’s agile transformation. As a member of the Agile Change Team, she was involved in both the creation and facilitation of the Agile, Systems Thinking, Lean and Kanban training suite. She became renowned for facilitating large groups at all levels of seniority through lean training simulations, and was also involved in both coaching individual agile teams and assisting larger programs of work adopting agile.
Following close involvement in the journey of the EDW Release Train, she attained the SAFe Program Consultant certification in 2013. Since then, she has added the SAFe training courses to her repertoire and is one of only 3 people in Australia to have delivered more than 75 SAFe courses. She is also Australia’s most experienced getKanban facilitator having run the simulation over 100 times. Karina combines a down to earth approach with honed facilitation skills and the war stories only practitioner experience can provide.
Catherine Haugh
SAFe Program Consultant
Catherine Haugh is a successful and responsible agile leader with extensive experience in the information technology arena. As a portfolio manager within RMIT University’s IT operations, Catherine was a key driver of RMIT’s adoption of Agile practices and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Catherine became the Release Train Engineer (RTE) of the organisation’s first Agile Release Train, building and leading a team of eight teams that successfully delivered across both project development and operations. The success of this Agile Release Train resulted in it becoming an official Scaled Agile Framework case study.
Catherine has spent 15 years managing the delivery and implementation of IT projects, has worked as a product manager at Oracle and a consultant with T-Systems Australia. She has lead projects across the technology landscape including enterprise infrastructure, enterprise applications, desktop and cloud services. Catherine is well versed in program and project management, consulting and software development as well as knowing what it takes to drive enterprise wide change in large organisations with complex business processes.
Catherine loves building and leading great teams to deliver great solutions to solve business problems. Her exposure to Agile has resulted in a radical transformation in her approach to IT delivery and stakeholder engagement. A certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), Catherine believes in the power of a continuous improvement culture and has embraced the role of agile change agent.
