Jane Helman

Jane Helman, Scrum Master.

Since I first stumbled upon Scrum and Agile about 7 years ago I was interested in understanding how a different way of thinking and working could have such a vastly different impact on the team.  As I started to work dig deeper into understand how Microsoft was using Scrum within their organization and developing out-of-the-box templates for other organizations to get started I became inspired.  I worked closely with those in engineering and outside of engineering to understand how I could use the tooling and the templates to help make their lives easier.  Two tireless years later the organization was using the tools daily for their work, and the teams finally started to become interested in learning more about Scrum and Agile.

Scrum is still in its early stages of adoption within the financial industry so I volunteered to be a Scrum Master and worked at educating the team on what Scrum/Agile/Kanban meant and what would work best for the organization. It was a full-time job, in addition to the full-time job for which I was hired to do.

In 2016, I decided to take the plunge and follow what I felt was a worthwhile risk, I took a full-time role as a Scrum Master.  Although the role was still very new and not widely adopted in companies, I felt it was something I could thrive at based on how much I enjoyed working with teams, working with processes and overall always trying to help teams become the best.

After 7 years, and meeting countless individuals in my field, I still feel like I've only scratched the surface of a topic that continues to evolve and improve with each sprint.