Gisela Provenzano
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Toptal member since October 25, 2022
Gisela is a systems engineer with over 16 years of experience working in different roles like a consultant, project manager, scrum master, and agile coach. She loves to say that agilists are facilitators, enablers, and those that help in making things happen. Her varied skills help her better empathize with the people she works with, putting her in a position where she can truly help them achieve their goals. She's people-oriented, data-driven, and passionate about her work.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Coaching
- Jira
- Kanban
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Lean
- Scrum
- Scrum Master
Work Experience
Agile Lead
Tutenlabs
- Established timeboxed sprints as they were not timeboxed when I arrived at the company. Trained scrum masters and POs in Scrum and Agile in general. Aligned product teams with business partners.
- Improved technical practices—defined a code review process to ensure a better quality of the code created. Implemented testing among developers to remove the bottleneck detected in QA, reducing cycle time in the teams that adopted the new process.
- Proposed product usability tests which were done for the first time with internal users (development teams). This also helped the different team members understand the flow of the product and the business rules.
- Created KPI dashboards with different metrics to help the teams identify areas of improvement for their delivery process.
Scrum Master and Fleet Agile Coach
Bitso
- Supported two teams in their events and facilitated daily meetings and retrospectives. Coached engineering managers in adopting Agile and managing their product and technical roadmaps. Helped product managers communicate priorities to the teams.
- Defined and created a KPI dashboard to track teams' progress and areas of improvement. Coached engineering managers on how to interpret the results and share them with the teams to define actions for improvement.
- Organized and coordinated quarterly planning events for the tribe, including helping with the roadmap definition, preparing planning activities, and facilitating planning events.
- Proposed improvements in the planning events, from quarterly planning to half-quarterly planning to be more adaptable to market changes.
- Defined progress reporting mechanisms to provide visibility to higher levels of management.
- Started tracking and managing team, fleet, and tribe risks and escalating them when appropriate.
Agile Coach
MURAL
- Performed an assessment of team agility, for two teams in each pillar, based on which I created improvement plans that were reviewed with the teams, with whom we agreed on how to proceed to implement improvements.
- Standardized a framework to work across the teams, which could later be adapted by each of them.
- Defined a set of KPIs to track teams' progress and areas of improvement.
- Defined an agile maturity model with which the teams could also understand how they were doing in regards to their growth in their way to becoming agile.
Delivery Manager
Intive
- Acted as a delivery manager for Kaplan (education), taking care of the 15-people team, facilitating communication between the team and the client, supporting Kaplan in detecting improvement areas, and taking actions to implement the improvements.
- Served as a scrum master at TodayTix, clarifying requirements, facilitating meetings and eliminating blockers, encouraging improvement, facilitating communication between the client and the team, and aligning the client's vision with team objectives.
- Acted as a delivery manager at Telemundo in a fixed-price project. Provided support to the product manager in the requirements definition, analyzed the scope and timeline, detected and mitigated risks, and defined strategies to meet hard deadlines.
- Built a team of people who wanted to grow in their careers and started working on an internal product for the presales area of Spark Digital, which was successful to the point that it led to the creation of a project incubator within the company.
- Created tech communities (guilds) for QA, mobile, and DevOps, scheduling and organizing training, helping in their career path definition, and providing support to the HR team in how to recruit new people in these areas.
Scrum Master and Agile Coach
Globant
- Acted as an agile coach for Westcon, supporting them in their agile journey and defining strategies for their agile adoption in a bottom-up way (team level). Facilitated a team agreement session and retrospectives and created a definition of done.
- Served as a scrum master at K12, facilitating communication with the client, ensuring on-time delivery, promoting quality, facilitating scrum events, and removing impediments.
- Acted as a scrum master for GAP, providing support in the adoption of Agile, working to solve impediments, and supporting the teams in breaking down the different problems that they had to solve into smaller pieces that reduced the risk.
- Served as a project manager for iSeatz and Pernod Ricard, ensuring communication flow with the clients, expanding the teams with different proposals to the clients, ensuring client satisfaction, and supporting team members in their motivation.
- Acted as a consultant for Deloitte and Carnival, assessing current processes and proposing improvements, prioritizing them, mentoring the teams when implementing the improvements, and creating status reports of the implementation progress.
Process Consultant
IBM
- Acted as process consultant providing support in the certification of CMMI 5.
- Defined process improvements and also new processes like business continuity and finance management.
- Trained PMs on estimating techniques such as function points and use case points.
- Performed analysis of financial and project health metrics, analysis of metrics trends, and proposed corrective actions to improve the performance of the projects.
Project History
Packing Optimization for GAP
Managed a data science project implemented with Agile. This project had such success that the client expanded the team from two to more than 20 in less than a year.
KPI Dashboard and Planning Improvement at Bitso
Implemented a KPI dashboard which led to insights that not only improved the teams' performance but also higher-level processes.
Based on quarterly scope creep, new observations were made that led to a proposal to change the quarterly planning process (SAFe) whose ROI was not as expected, to half-quarterly plannings. After three iterations of the new approach, the teams felt more comfortable and able to adapt to changing needs.
Agile Maturity Model
Launched an agile maturity model based on the current status of the company and the desired future state.
Tool for Presales Team of Spark Digital
Launched a tool for the company's presales team, having formed a team composed of people who were not motivated with their formal assignments to client projects in the company.
I formed a team and started working to create a tool for the presales area of the company, which was using Google Sheets at the time for analyzing and estimating their potential proposals. It took the team eight months to build the tool, using new and trendy technologies. The project was very successful to the point that Spark Digital replicated the idea and created an incubator where anyone could join to work in parallel assignments to their current projects to learn new techs and create POCs.
Education
Diploma in Systems Engineering
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires - Tandil, Argentina
Diploma in Systems Engineering
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires - Tandil, Argentina
Certifications
Agile Metrics
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Jira, Miro, MURAL, Atlassian Suite, Microsoft Project, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Confluence, Slack, Asana, Google Data Studio, Skype, Trello
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Key Performance Metrics, Servant Leadership, Agile Leadership, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Lean, Kanban, Agile Project Management, Requirements Analysis, Change Management, Azure DevOps, Management, Design Thinking, CMMI
Platforms
Azure, Nexus
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Logistics, Retail & Wholesale
Other
Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, Scrum Master, Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Risk Management, Project Management, Small Business, Spanish-English Translation, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), IT Project Management, Project Reporting, Cross-functional Collaboration, Startups, Communication Management, Process Improvement, Backlog Management, User Stories, Project Coordination, Project Scheduling, Task Scheduling, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Web Project Management, Project Management & Delivery, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Reporting, Sprint Planning, Estimation & Planning, Product Roadmaps, Feature Planning, Business Requirements, Creative Problem Solving, Detail-oriented, Tools, Project Management Operations, Sprint Ceremonies, Software Development, Software Project Management, Hybrid Project Management, Customer Service, Task Management, Product Owner, New Products, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Agile Coaching, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Stakeholder Management, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Project Planning, SaaS, Proof of Concept (POC), Scope Management, Project Timelines, Fintech, Customer Success, Technical Project Management, Operational Assessments, Early-stage Startups, Engineering Management, Coaching, Software as a Service (SaaS), Product Ownership, eCommerce, Project Discovery, Feature Prioritization, User Flows, Program Management, Discovery Workshops, Product Development, Supply Chain, Client Delivery Management, Account Management, Discovery, SAFe 6, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Teams, Teamwork, Collaboration, Empathy, Inter-departmental Alignment, Facilitation, Workshop Facilitation, Roadmaps, Planning, Leadership, Staffing, Performance, User Experience (UX), PMI, ISO 27001, Communication, Status Updates, Consulting, ISO 9001, Process Design, Business Processes, Google, Google Meet, Vertical Slicing, Team Building, Retrospective Techniques, Analysis, Business Analysis, Event Management, Event Planning, Databases, PERT Chart, Project Engineering, Web & Mobile Applications
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring