Hello! My name is Anthony Grozdanovski, but everyone calls me Tony. I am a servant leader with expertise in business and product development, cross-functional team leadership and delivering positive outcomes with strong and sustainable gains. I have leveraged my strong; planning, communication, organization, decision-making, and testing background to successfully direct numerous projects and deliverables across large organizations. I am striving to focus on career advancement in the following areas: project management, leadership, test automation, and full stack development.

A deeper dive into interests:

Project Management

I have spent most of my career focusing on delivery. One of my favorite parts about project management is the satisfaction of a successful delivery and the relationships gained along the way. Creating delivery frameworks as part of the Project Management Office helped me understand various methodologies (Agile/Waterfall) and being able to adjust in any work environment. I am a certified Scrum Master and Project Manager in my current role. Some key takeaways I have learned that are required in a successful project are continuous communication and rigorous testing.

Leadership

During my time at Bowling Green State University, I was fortunate enough to get an internship at Nationwide insurance as a Business Analyst. As an intern the project I decided to focus on, with my direct report, was connecting with the lines of businesses within Retirement Plans IT. The result was a Matrix identifying the roles and responsibilities of each team. I used this as a networking opportunity to identify what I wanted to do after college. I learned a tremendous amount about the various lines of businesses. The key thing that continued to stand out to me was all the leadership roles and relationships the internal teams had. I couldn’t help but notice how the managers and directors interacted or how the Associate vice presidents or vice presidents all led in different ways. This struck a nerve with me. As the owner of a small business in Landscaping growing up, I never had the opportunity to look beyond what was in front of me. I wanted to learn more. I decided from there to change my major to specialize in Business Administration. As I have continued to learn and grow within my career, I have always paid attention to the way the organization works. How do the teams operate, how do they connect to one another, what is the structure throughout the organization… Being able to understand these questions has helped me greatly with my relationships and being able to have successful deliveries. Knowing who to talk to, where to get the proper information, and how to bring teams together is something I am passionate about. Whether it’s leading a large-scale project that requires a lot of overhead and attention to clients or getting my hands dirty with my development team to solve an issue, I strive for positive outcomes and relationships along the way. I want to help you become the best version of yourself. My long-term goal is to one day work in executive leadership. Until then, I will use the knowledge and experience I have learned throughout my career and continue to be the best servant leader I can be. Some well-known CEOs that I like to read and stay up to date with are Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Tim Cook. Some mentors and leaders I have been fortunate to surrounded myself around that have made a significant impact in my career are Mike D, Pete D, Neal G, and Kevin A. - Thank you all for your help

Test Automation

While at Lightwell I have had the opportunity to lead/be a part of a team building a Test Automation Framework. The framework has been very successful with various clients. The idea behind the framework is “write testable code.” Thus, alleviating efforts in the future used on root cause analysis for bug fixes or enhancements. As a project manager/scrum master understanding the test automation framework we have created was challenging for me. One way that helped me understand the most was to get my hands dirty with the development team. I spent time learning the dashboard, understanding how our tools integrate, etc. The testing dashboard is used as part of our scrum meetings. When doing this I am able to run automated tests to confirm everything is up and running correctly, allowing us to focus on the sprint/tasks at hand. If there are any tests that fail, as an end user, I can identify where the problem occurred so I can properly communicate with the responsible team. The framework uses tools such as Cucumber, Jenkins, Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, to list a few. The best part about the test automation framework is our clients can use and understand the dashboard quickly. It brings us closer to the client. The testing framework acts as a middle ground between, what is being communicated to what is happening. As a consultant, I have found this to be a very helpful tool/framework in delivery. As I mentioned prior, the key to a successful project is continuous communication and rigorous testing. Due to our test automation framework at Lightwell, I have been able to expand on my knowledge of testing to now include test automation. This is an interest of mine because I see large scale opportunities to help organizations across IT. Most of the projects I have worked on all required the skillset and knowledge in testing. Ironically, the clients always lacked this skill set and I have had the opportunity to assist in that deficit.

Full Stack Development

I have spent time throughout my career at different engagements learning about Information Technology in its entirety. I have taken Scrum Master courses, AWS trainings and certifications, acted as a Jira administrator, used Postman/Atlassian rest API for automation, and developed test automation. I plan on learning more about IT. I feel it would be very important to understand and be able to perform full stack development activities. One way that I am approaching this lesson, is by creating my own website! That’s right, I created this website from start to finish. I had a blast along the way, but I cannot say it wasn’t challenging. I believe being able to comprehend development whether its front or back end is a required skill for my career. I hope you enjoy my site!