ALN Houston

Agile Leadership Network – Houston

Board

 

Samant Kumar

 

President

 

Samant Kumar is a multiple award-winning Portfolio Manager and Agile Program Manager at Capgemini, with over 20 years of experience in Agile Program and Project Management. He holds certifications such as SAFe SPC, PMI-ACP, ICP-ACC, A-CSM, CSM, and CSPO, and is known for his expertise in agile coaching, leadership, and driving successful project outcomes.

Samant is a prominent speaker at conferences like Agile 2024, Agile Tour Vilnius 2024, PMI Houston 50th Conference, UTD Project Management Symposium, Texas A&M, and Rice University. He has served as a judge at global events such as the Stevie Awards, Johns Hopkins Product Management Club competition, Science fair and numerous hackathons including HackRice and HackUTD.

His accolades include the Globee Award, Global Recognition Award, and Claro Award. Samant is also actively involved in mentorship programs at Katy ISD and adplist.org.

As President of the Agile Leadership Network Houston, Samant is committed to fostering a collaborative and innovative environment for Agile leaders and practitioners in the Houston area.

Beyond his professional life, Samant resides in Katy, Texas, with his wife and two children. He enjoys reading, traveling, cooking, meditation, and mentoring on spirituality.

 

 

 

Sesh Veeraraghavan

 

 

Advisor Emeritus

 
 
Sesh is a transformative agile and engineering leader with a strong technical background. Over the past 20 years, he has coached and led several high-performing global agile delivery teams. He focuses on sustainable business agility and has presented on topics such as culture, innovation, and communities of practice at various conferences. He still codes as time permits and enjoys spending free time with his wife and their 2 rescue dogs. He is an avid reader (non-fiction) and dabbles in digital art and meditation. 

 

 

Shailesh Dadhaniya

 

Treasurer

 

Agile evangelist, coach, and adoption advisory to senior business and IT executives. Experienced agile leader, facilitator, mentor, and consultant with all aspects of Agile Framework. Adept at building high performing teams and bringing cultural change towards achieving lean, efficient, and effective processes. 

 

Lynn Ruthrauff

 

Secretary

 

Founder of Integrated Transformations Corporation using agile and lean methodologies to facilitate and lead strategic planning efforts and technology modernization with a people first approach. Bringing 40 years of experience in management and executive leadership in Silicon, PC, and Printer manufacturing; ERP, on premise and cloud software, DevOps, marketing sales; and leading oil and gas back office, field services, financial and HR technology project implementations.

Eric Marsh

 

Technology Director

 

Eric Marsh is a Web Advisor Coach at HostGator. As a Web Advisor Coach, he spends his days helping the customer-facing support team improve their skills and processes. Before becoming one of the first coaches at HostGator, Eric Marsh played a big part in leading a team of agents to support a corporate project successfully. He greatly values the importance of continuous improvement and adaptability by ensuring he’s always up for the challenge of learning new responsibilities his role may bring to him. He has been attending meetings with the Agile Leadership Network since he started learning about Agile back in the Fall of 2018 and now serves as the Technology Chair. He earned his Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product owner certifications in the summer of 2019 to improve his skills and is eager to step into the role.

 

Outside of work, Eric enjoys traveling and dining at new restaurants with his wife, trying new and different cuisines. One of his favorite hobbies is learning new tricks on his Yo-yo, despite how many times he may injure himself with it.