Kelli is a Lockheed Martin Fellow and the Technical Lead of the Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) Agility Transformation Office (AXO). She is responsible for driving the adoption of lean and agile practices across programs and functional areas, defining transformation strategies, coaching teams, and capturing successful patterns to accelerate the delivery of business outcomes and ensure knowledge continuity.
With over 40 years of experience in software engineering, solution architecture, project management, and business transformation consulting, Kelli has worked across the defense, federal, and commercial sectors. She has a proven track record of transforming organizations and building high-performing teams through lean and agile principles, resulting in measurable project and program performance improvements.
Kelli has led 19 agile transformations, achieving “double-digit” performance gains. Her efforts have earned her multiple awards, including a Program Management Review (PMR) Customer Recognition award for driving radical transparency.
Kelli was instrumental in developing MFC’s agile playbook, enabling the company to scale agility adoption and earning her team the prestigious MFC Excellence Award. She also contributed to corporate guidance on Program Performance Management (PPM) for agile programs, providing a practical approach to tracking performance in an agile context.
An active participant in multiple professional organizations, Kelli is part of the leadership team for the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) Systems Engineering Division (SED) Agile Delivery for Agencies, Programs and Teams (ADAPT) Committee, where she helps facilitate industry-government collaboration to continuously improve the implementation of agile practices to meet business and mission outcomes.
Kelli holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in engineering, has earned numerous agile and coaching certifications, is the author of several books and articles, and has spoken at over 70 events.
Outside of her professional pursuits, Kelli enjoys practicing yoga, cycling, reading, and spending quality time with her two grown children and her husband of 36 years.
The most innovative mission-critical capabilities in the world won’t matter if they can’t be delivered on time and within budget. Effectively tracking progress against scope, schedule, and cost is critical to program success.
However, this becomes challenging when software is developed incrementally while hardware and overall system lifecycles follow a more traditional waterfall approach. The natural tension between these methodologies makes tracking project or program performance in ways that supports agility while maintaining accountability more difficult.
As the demand for rapid innovation and flexible development grows, integrating agile practices with traditional program management processes is essential to remaining competitive and achieving positive delivery outcomes at “the speed of relevance”.
Agile Program Performance Management (PPM) is a modern approach to performance management built on three core principles:
1. Organizing people and work around value
2. Refining the solution and plan based on real-time feedback
3. Managing change through data-driven decisions
This interactive, hands-on master class brings Agile PPM to life through a practical exercise, demonstrating how to track program performance in a dynamic environment. Attendees will gain actionable strategies to not only answer the question, “Will we make it?” reliably, but also pivot effectively if the answer is “No.”
Target Audience: This workshop is intended for program or project team members who are responsible for establishing, executing and/or overseeing performance tracking for large complex projects and programs.
Learning Objectives:
Maintaining the Pillars of Project Governance & Control in the Era of Business Intelligence, AI, & Real-Time Analytics
Are our established project governance frameworks built for yesterday’s challenges? As AI, real-time analytics, and BI tools become more and more intrinsic to project delivery, the concept of ‘single source of truth’ has never been more critical, or more complex. How do we trust the outputs of a ‘black box’ AI? How do we empower teams with live data without sacrificing deliberate control? How do we maintain control in an increasingly automated landscape?
Our panel of experts will ponder these questions and more as we take a closer look at the practical steps needed to evolve our governance models, embrace a digital future and strengthen the pillars of project governance.
In today’s fast-paced, mission-driven project and program delivery environments, the ability to answer the question, “Will we make it?” is critical to success. The most innovative solutions and capabilities become irrelevant if they aren’t delivered on time and within the allocated budget.
As the demand for rapid delivery and flexible development approaches grows, integrating agile practices with traditional program management governance and control processes is essential to remaining competitive and achieving positive delivery outcomes at “the speed of relevance”.
Mission-critical solutions involve multiple disciplines. While the software is increasingly developed incrementally, the hardware and the overall system lifecycle often follow a more traditional waterfall approach. The natural tension between these methodologies creates challenges in effectively tracking program performance, making it difficult to manage scope, schedule, and cost in a way that supports agility while maintaining accountability.
This keynote will explore the core principles of Agile Program Performance Management (Agile PPM)—an innovative approach that applies agile practices to track progress against scope, schedule, and cost. Agile PPM ensures the right decisions are made at the right time, enabling organizations to confidently answer the big question, “Will we make it?” and pivot effectively when necessary.
This session will also serve as an introduction to the integration of Agile PPM into governance and controls processes, which will be explored in detail in a hands-on masterclass. In that session, attendees will “deep dive” into practical strategies that will enable them to apply Agile PPM in their own project and program delivery domains.
In today’s fast-paced, mission-driven project and program delivery environments, the ability to answer the question, “Will we make it?” is critical to success. The most innovative solutions and capabilities become irrelevant if they aren’t delivered on time and within the allocated budget.
As the demand for rapid delivery and flexible development approaches grows, integrating agile practices with traditional program management governance and control processes is essential to remaining competitive and achieving positive delivery outcomes at “the speed of relevance”.
Mission-critical solutions involve multiple disciplines. While the software is increasingly developed incrementally, the hardware and the overall system lifecycle often follow a more traditional waterfall approach. The natural tension between these methodologies creates challenges in effectively tracking program performance, making it difficult to manage scope, schedule, and cost in a way that supports agility while maintaining accountability.
This keynote will explore the core principles of Agile Program Performance Management (Agile PPM)—an innovative approach that applies agile practices to track progress against scope, schedule, and cost. Agile PPM ensures the right decisions are made at the right time, enabling organizations to confidently answer the big question, “Will we make it?” and pivot effectively when necessary.
This session will also serve as an introduction to the integration of Agile PPM into governance and controls processes, which will be explored in detail in a hands-on masterclass. In that session, attendees will “deep dive” into practical strategies that will enable them to apply Agile PPM in their own project and program delivery domains.
The most innovative mission-critical capabilities mean little if they can’t be delivered on time and within budget. Effectively tracking progress across scope, schedule, and cost is essential to program success—but this becomes especially challenging when agile development must coexist with a traditional, waterfall-based system lifecycle.
As the demand for rapid innovation and adaptive delivery grows, integrating agile practices with traditional program management—including earned value management (EVM)—is critical to staying competitive and delivering at the speed of relevance.
This session presents proven practices for aligning agile execution with EVM requirements, enabling meaningful performance measurement in a fast-moving, hybrid development environment.
