Gisella Balza
Hello! I´m a Scrum Master and Agile Project Manager, enthousiastic about leading autonomous, effective and happy teams.
Experienced Professional
16 years of experience with IT, 6 of them as IT Project Manager applying Agile and Waterfall Frameworks.
Certificated
Scrum Master Professional SMPC® and Project Management Professional PMP®
Multi-Cultural
Experience leading Off-shore, Multi-cultural, and geographically distributed teams.
Where I’ve Worked
I initiated working on IT Projects back in 2004 when I started as an IT Consultant.
Fast-forward to today, and I’ve had the privilege of working at a Big Four Consulting Firm, a multinational brewing company, an Oil and Gas Firm and a multinational software development company, among others.
May-23 – Current
- Coordinated 3 Scrum/Kanban teams (payments, content and taxes), for a retail customer in the US.
- Lead Ceremonies (Sprint Planning, Daily, Demo/Sprint Review, Retrospectives) and Team Building activities.
- English project management
Technologies: Jira, Confluence, Tempo, Sharepoint, Angular, React, c#.
2023 – 2024
- Coordinated development of web pages, leading Sprint ceremonies and removing blockers.
- Coordinated the implementation of a Cloud Migration Project (MS Azure) and helped Architect, Devs, Testers, DBAs to remove blockers.
- Helped the Scrum Team create concise product backlog items
- Projects 100% in English, remote and geographically distributed (Canadá, India, Nigeria)
Methodologies: Waterfall and Scrum
Tools: Jira, Azure Cloud, - Tools for teams: Sitecore, JavaScript, HTML, Cypress, Sharepoint.
2020 – present
– Scrum Master for development, testing and automation teams, for a customer (Bank/Banking) in the US.
– Technologies used: Salesforce, c#, .net, React, Selenium.
– Helped the teams create concise product backlog items, and develop high-value products
– Facilitated Scrum ceremonies,
– Removed project impediments
– Multilingual project management (English/Spanish)
2013 – 2018
- Planned and executed over 20 IT projects for an Oil and Gas company, with a general budget of USD 500.000 / year.
- Technologies: SAP, PoweBI, .net, ArcGis, Tableau and more.
- Supervised +20 consultants who provided SAP technical support to +1.800 users.
- Facilitated the adoption of agile values and principles, eliminate impediments for teams, and encourage their self-organization.
Projects
These are some of the teams/Projects that I´ve been leading.
Initiatives to implement and improve online payments with PayPal, Apple Pay, MercadoPago, Flexpay and others.
Test Automation for Salesforce (Framework and development of automated Test Cases).
Tools: c#, Selenium, Webdriver, RestSharp, Git
Also, Test automation for payments test cases.
Manual testing for features developed in Terafina.
Test Cases built on Azure Devops + Exploratory Testing.
Achievements
Morale of the Team
The satisfaction index of the Teams was about 98% (Measured with a Survey)
Continous Improvement
I held fun retrospectives where the team expressed their insight about what we could change to improve the way we worked and our results.
Customer satisfaction
The general satisfaction of our last customer was 93%, measuring aspects like likehood to recommend and likehood to repurchase.
About Me
I started my career as an internal IT consultant. However, over the years I’ve worn many hats, including external IT consultant, Master Data leader, IT Specialist, Project Manager and Scrum Master.
Now, I focus my efforts to ensure a collaborative culture exists within the teams and that they are commited to a common goal.
