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Biography
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Susan Burgess has spent over 40 years in various roles in information technology, primarily in the financial services industry. She began her career at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in computer operations, where she created operational support procedures and provided training for IMS. She went on to work at Bank of Nova Scotia as a technical analyst providing database support, and Canadian Tire Corporation as a database administrator.
At Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Susan held various technical analyst roles leading to the coveted position of a technology architect, and subsequently became the first manager of systems integration. As manager of testing facilities, she was responsible for all mainframe testing environments.
Her last corporate position was as manager of enterprise test consulting at RBC, where she was responsible for the creation of testing environments, implementation of a new QA/testing education plan, provision of a data masking process to comply with PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection Electronic Document Act), quality assurance oversight for business applications, and enterprise-wide testing strategies. One of her many projects was to plan, supervise and execute an RBC volume stress-testing project where the only facility with enough capacity for the test was IBM’s test site in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Susan received several awards, including ones for Outstanding Contribution to the Successful Building of RBC’s Year2000 Test Environment, and for Creation of the Performance, Volume, and Stress Test Environment.
She presented to a number of international organizations, including the Bank of China, on the implementation of quality assurance, and presented to the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) advocating for the creation of the Canadian Software Testing Board (CSTB). Susan was instrumental in founding the CSTB, and was a member of its executive board for five years. As a member of the executive, she represented the CSTB at several international conferences.
Susan has a foundations certificate in information technology information library (ITIL) from Pink Elephant, a certificate in project management from the University of Toronto, and a letter of accomplishment (with honours) from the Institute of Canadian Bankers.
She left the corporate world in 2010 and began instructing at Sheridan, where she has taught courses such as IT Project Management using PMP, Systems Analysis and Design, and Introduction to Business Software Systems. She has been the course lead for IT Project Management using PMP and Introduction to Business Software Systems.
