Yvonne To

Yvonne To graduated from McMaster University with a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Masters of Engineering degree in Telecommunications. 

Yvonne started her career at Bell Canada in 1995 as a Customer System Engineer with the Financial sectors, serving the five big Banks in Canada.  Later on, she moved into a Senior Network Architect position, focusing on designing and optimizing customers' telecommunication networks.  In 2007, she acquired her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification with the Project Management Institute (PMI).  An opportunity soon arose after she was certified as a PMP.  She transferred to the Bell Technology Development department and started her career as a Senior Program Manager.  During her employment as a Senior Project Manager with the new Department, Yvonne successfully developed the NPI (New Product Introduction) engagement process within the Technology Development district.   She also participated in a few other process enhancement initiatives which reduced 30% of the time required to complete the exploration phase of the projects.

Yvonne started her agile journey in late 2014 when Bell Canada launched the Net 3.0 transformation initiatives.  As the Senior Program Manager with the Technology Development district, she was a key driver for process transformation to enhance the agility of the product and new technology development projects.  Yvonne picked a couple of projects as trial projects for scrum, and successfully proven scrum worked effectively on development testing.

With the proven successes of scrum for new Technology and Tools development projects, the Technology Department wanted to expand the agile mode of operations to cover more development projects.  In 2015, official scrum teams started to form running DevOps.  Initially, scrum teams' members were all part time.  During this time, Yvonne played the role of both the Agile Project Manager and the Scrum Master.  Later that year, the Net 3.0 transformation initiatives expanded to cover People, Technology and Process transformation.  Because of this expansion, scrum teams with full time team members started to form.   During this expansion, Yvonne took on the Scrum Master role for the Network Programmability team, which drove automation within Bell Canada.  Sprint planning meetings were held at the start of the 2-week sprint.  Daily scrums were run every morning.  Each sprint concluded with a Sprint demo to the Product owner, end users and stakeholders.  Feedback was collected from the demos and retrospectives were held for Continuous Improvement.

Yvonne is well known to be an agile transformation agent in Bell Canada.  She coached start-up scrum teams and facilitated the scrum kickoffs across various districts.  Furthermore, she worked with the Career Development team to develop the Net 3.0 Technology Certification Program.  At this moment, the Certification Program has successfully started with the Foundation and the Intermediate levels.  The Advanced level will be available soon.  In addition, she worked with the Human Resources (HR) department in the OP (Objectives Performance and Evaluation Process) transformation for the agile teams.  The objective is to adjust or change the current evaluation process so that it fit better for the DevOps scrum environment.

To help expanding scrum in the company, Yvonne held a lot of "Go and See" visits with colleagues who wanted to start using scrum to deliver their projects.  Knowledge sharing sessions were also held between scrums teams to learn and share experiences with each other, facilitated "check and adjust" for continuous improvements for the teams.  

In her spare time, Yvonne likes going to the gym and attending yoga classes.

Yvonne also hold the CSM, CSPO, PMI-ACP, Cert.APM, ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP) and TOGAF 9.1 certifications.