Ilka Stefanova

Experience

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  SiteGround Web Hosting Company

  Jun 2005 - Mar 2007

  Sales Representative

  Main Responsibilities:▪ Communicating with current and potential clients all over the world through phone calls, chatand emails;▪ Discussing and selling company products (web hosting, domains, third party CMS systemsand design templates).

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  Mag Studio

  Mar 2007 - Apr 2008

  Project Manager

  Main Responsibilities: ▪ Responsible for planning, execution, and closing of project’s requirements and objectives intime, within budget and quality;▪ Communicating all open items and issues with the project team and project stakeholders;▪ Prepare specification/scope documentation;▪ Prepare progress reports to clients;▪ Manage project deliveries.

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  Haemimont AD

  Apr 2008 - Sept 2018

  Main responsibilities:• Execute on Scrum Master responsibilities, including organizing and facilitating daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos and other Scrum-related meetings.• Track and communicate sprint/release progress.• Work with the Product Management team to develop release plans and ensure product backlogs are well-groomed and prioritized.• Collaborate with teams to define scope, priority, and expected delivery of features. Assist with requirement analysis.• Manage cross-functional teams.• Ensure that the development teams are practicing/following core agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility.• Collaborate closely with other Scrum Masters and Product Managers in managing cross-team dependencies.• Participate proactively in developing and maintaining team standards, tools, and best practices.• Facilitating discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution.• Assist with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and information sharing.• Enable teams to become self-organizing and self-managing to achieve their goals.• Shield the teams from external impediments.• Build a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised with an emphasis on problem solving.• Work to proactively identify scrum team roadblocks and resolve them efficiently with the stakeholders• Work with JIRA and Confluence. Show less Main Responsibilities: • Responsible for all phases of the project management process: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, closing. • Analyse initial project requirements. Define clear and attainable project objectives. Prepare specification/scope documentation with visual wireframes. • Prepare project proposal based on agreed project scope. • Define detailed project plans including tasks, timelines, milestones and resource requirements needed to successfully complete projects. • Work with the team to identify critical dependencies and risks likely to impact cost, time, and quality, early in the project life cycle. • Keep project on track and resolve/escalate any issues by communicating them to the appropriate stakeholders and apply agreed resolution strategy.• Manage the project team to identify and resolve issues in a timely manner.• Track project deliverables and milestones using appropriate tools.• Manage the project change control process. Analyse change requests’ effect on the project scope, schedule and budget. Ensure that all required project approvals are in place before the change is applied.• Provide project updates on a consistent basis to various stakeholders about strategy, adjustments, and progress.• Manage cross-functional web and software design and development teams. Support and direct project teams. Manage team communication, task allocation and internal meetings.• Develop a communication strategy and meeting plans. Communicate all open items and issues with the project team and project stakeholders.• Leverage best practices and patterns for optimized delivery.• Facilitate discussion, decision making and conflict resolution. • Work independently on multiple projects simultaneously.• Work with project team and leadership to remove barriers to success.• Work with JIRA, MS Project, MS Visio. Show less

  • Scrum Master (Consultant in Risk Management Solutions-https://www.rms.com/)

    Oct 2014 - Sept 2018

  • Project Manager

    Apr 2008 - Sept 2018
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  OH Cards Institute - Bulgaria

  Jan 2017 - Jun 2019

  Trainer and facilitator

  OH is a genre of metaphoric associative cards that are used in personal, artistic, and cultural context through various methods varying from counseling to creativity. Areas of use: Education and Pedagogy, Therapy and Counselling, Child and Youth Therapy, Creative Therapy, Trauma Therapy, Health and Healing, Social Issues, Business and Workplace, Arts.

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  Synchronoss Technologies

  Mar 2019 - Jul 2020

  Scrum Master

  Leading 2 distributed Scrum teams and facilitating full end to end delivery of features and continuous improvement both in the delivery effort and implementation of SAFE and Agile practices in the organization. Main Responsibilities:• Execute on Scrum Master responsibilities: daily scrums, sprint planning, retrospectives and demos. • Enable teams to become self-organizing and self-managing.• Assist Product Owner in backlog refinement and stories definition.• Shield the teams from external impediments by escalating and communicating any risks and cross-team dependencies at regular SoS meeting.• Ensure the team is following the core Agile principles.• Help with defining, implementing and improving processes such as continuous delivery releases, bug triage, branching and tech currency strategy.• Participate in the implementation of the SAFe by organizing workshops and PI planning, identify dependencies in the scope, advocating on basic principles of SAFe.• Lead a complex project for re-writing major part of the product to improve performance, introduce new features and decrease the technical debt. Show less

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  News UK

  Sept 2020 - now

  Agile Project Manager