Creating Value-Based Backlogs

Luke Hohmann is the founder and CEO of Conteneo Inc. (formerly the Innovation Games® Company). Conteneo’s enterprise software platforms and professional services merge collaboration frameworks, data analytics, and domain expertise to help organizations optimize decision making in the areas of strategy, innovation, sales, product development, and market research. Luke is also cofounder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation (EVEF), a 501(c)3 nonprofit that that helps citizens, governments, and other nonprofit organizations collaborate at scale to solve technical and wicked problems. EVEF has been a leader in the Participatory Budgeting movement, helping citizens prioritize hundreds of millions of dollars through budget games. EVEF has also partnered with the Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the first platform for scalable deliberative decision making. Supported by both Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, Luke is thankful for the thousands of colleagues from the Agile community who have donated their time to EVEF.

Jurgen De Smet is an Agile and executive coach, trainer, and collaboration architect. He started to really learn (read: out of school) in 1996 within Software Development environments all over Europe. Since 2006, Jurgen has been designing work activities and processes using game techniques with a focus on collaboration, engagement, and fun. Throughout the years, he acquired the practice and skills to design and facilitate Innovation Games ®, Gamestorming, Business Model Generation, and other highly collaborative workshops in many different domains and on many different levels.

George has worked for over 13 years combining knowledge from the fields of systems thinking, operations management, complexity, leadership and influence, with improvement paradigms such as Lean thinking, the theory of constraints, and Agile development in his consulting work.Prior to founding ObjectiveChange, George co-founded BigVisible Solutions, a consultancy focused on Agile product development methods, and was instrumental in growing the company to become the industry leader in agile coaching. He also worked as a consultant for companies like ThoughtWorks and Computer Sciences Corporation. Practical experience with the challenges of introducing significant change in organizations of many sizes was instrumental in developing ObjectiveChange's vision and approach to continuous improvement to a more broad set of challenges.George’s education includes an MBA from Bentley University, a BBA in Operations Management with a primary focus on continuous improvement paradigms, and a BS in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.