The August 2025 edition of Calgary BR Tech brought a familiar face to the front of the room. Rebecca Souza, a regular at our meetups, finally took her turn as speaker on August 25th at the Platform Innovation Centre, with a talk on project management in practice. The evening started about fifteen minutes late while the team set up the livestream for those following online, and then it was straight into the content.
A Tour Through the Methodologies
Rebecca opened with her background: more than 15 years in IT, spanning infrastructure, data, data centers, support, incident management and IT governance, plus degrees in IT management and postgraduate studies in agile and traditional project management. Today she works as a Project Coordinator and is a certified Scrum Master.
From there, she built the topic up layer by layer. She separated projects from ongoing operations, and projects from programs and portfolios. She explained how the classic “triple constraint” of cost, scope and time has grown into a hexagon that puts quality at the centre, alongside resources and risk. Then came the part she said many people were waiting for: life cycles and methodologies. She covered waterfall, which she argued is still the right call for things like building a data center, then iterative and incremental approaches, agile and Scrum, and hybrid models, plus a quick look at PMBOK, Kanban, Lean and PRINCE2.
She kept coming back to two ideas. The first was planning: “a well-planned project will be well executed.” The second was communication, which she called essential more than once. She described the project manager as a facilitating leader rather than a boss. She also offered a “part two” to anyone who wants a deeper dive into each methodology.
Questions From the Room
The Q&A ran long and turned into a real exchange. One attendee asked how a Scrum Master should handle requests that fall outside the agreed scope mid-project. Another asked whether companies ever drop the project manager role entirely in favour of Scrum Masters. Rebecca shared a case where former project managers moved into a portfolio role, and an attendee added his own story of two large insurance mergers, one led by project managers and the other by Scrum Masters. That exchange led Rebecca to recommend the book Our Iceberg Is Melting for anyone guiding teams through change.
There were also practical questions: whether Kanban can work on its own, what Canadian employers look for in someone entering the field, and where the line falls between a simple project and a complex one. For newcomers, Rebecca pointed to Project Administrator roles as an entry point. For complexity, her short answer was to go back to the triple constraint.
The night closed with a round of applause for Rebecca, thanks to Platform Calgary for hosting us, and the usual networking.
The full recording is below if you want to see the whole talk and Q&A.
▶ Watch the recording
Watch on YouTube →
