Suzanne Van Milder

My Name is Suzanne Anthony and I am a certified Scrum Master having over 6 years of Project Management experience in various industries and have had the pleasure of working in both Waterfall and Agile environments. My career has taken me through many great opportunities which have led me eventually to find my passion in Agile, from being a Project Coordinator to gradually moving into the role of a Project Control Officer (PCO) and later to working in an agile role as scrum master. Once I became a scrum master I felt that I have finally found an area that not only was I good at but truly loved what I was doing. I decided I wanted to further my career in agile which lead me to get my official certification as a Scrum master.

I started my Scrum Career leading a team in an insurance industry, which was both new for me and the organization to embrace the agile methodology, there were definitely a lot of challenges and at the same time it taught us on collaborating with each other and being transparent are crucial to the success of an agile team. I would say the most valuable lesson we learned was that we are one team; one fails we all fail, which was a big eye opener for all on the team. It taught us to be open with each other and communication was vital in having a strong agile team. After all the struggles we went through and coming out successful in the end being one of the first agile teams in the organization made us mentors and role models for other teams and departments in the organization. They too began to lean more towards working with an Agile methodology.

That was the start of something new and exciting in my career, from there I went on to other organizations and learned that the agile methodology is what I was passionate about and I wanted to excel in. I had an amazing opportunity working with Tangerine leading the Agile Center of Excellence (Agile CoE) and leading the Agile Transformation team as scrum master. It was truly an inspiration leading the team and watching the entire organization focus on Agile methodologies, slowly moving the waterfall projects into agile and seeing the benefit on doing so. However, every organization has its difficult moment’s and challenges, but seeing the entire organization being so transparent and collaborating together to achieve a common goal was an amazing experience and a good development career experience for me. Moving now to Scotia Bank where I am a scrum master in the Enterprise Data Management Office (EDMO) and having the opportunity of working with amazing folks enhances and enriches me in my development and growth and makes me a better Scrum master. There is always continuous learning opportunities and now that the organization is focusing on applying agile and DevOps principles (an area I want to start learning more about) having this chance I see as a new and exciting challenge for me I am looking forward to working and incorporating the DevOps principles into my teams.

For my future I see me continuing my growth and career within agile environments, keeping current with the changes that are occurring in the community and learning new best practices from more senior scrum masters and coaches throughout the industry.