Evie Fan

Evie Fan was introduced to Agile in 2009 when receiving “Scrum Team Training and Workshop” at the EMC Corporation. Since then, Evie has led Agile transformation and implementation successfully at multiple levels - from organizational, program, to team levels - at technology-based industry-leading companies.

At organizational level, Evie spearheaded enterprise-wide Agile adoption and transformation at both EMC and Liberty Mutual, where she blazed trails through practical implementations and influenced with sensible leadership and enacting Agile values and principles. Her thought-leadership and big picture view were evidenced by the successful transformation journey she led her divisions and teams through. At program level, Evie’s talents and Agile leadership were demonstrated in numerous success stories, such as leading and organizing company-wide PI Planning meetings, initiating and executing cross-discipline and cross-team feature grooming sessions, defining and creating various program-level processes and artifacts to connect the workflow from executive level to front lines, driving communication and collaboration across groups and functions, to name a few. At team level, Evie’s Agile leadership capabilities were built upon years of experiences working in and leading software engineering teams. Examples include, but not limited to, leading the pilot teams to transform from deep-rooted Waterfall mentality to Scrum for agility and transparency, running both local and offshore teams that were in different Agile transformation phases with influencing capabilities across cultures, building up cross-functional Agile teams that achieved higher productivity and impacting innovation, etc.

Evie’s real-world success in Agile leadership was built upon her solid training and continuous learning. She became a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) in 2014 and earned her higher-level certification of Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) in 2016. Evie also took formal training in two prevalent scaling frameworks, and she became a Certified SAFe Agilist in 2016 and a Certified LeSS Practitioner in 2018. Additionally, Evie has engaged in Agile communities, extensive self-study, following Agile at large, and she also attended the “Agile 2018” conference.

Evie is very proficient in using Agile project management tools, such as Jira, Confluence, SLACK, Rally, Trello, as well as the various plug-ins. She developed automated, dynamic Agile metrics and dashboards that brought transparency and ease of use to all.

Evie’s unique strength and what stands her out lie in her thought leadership and aptitude to turn theories and principles to pragmatic implementations and capability to define, scale, and streamline. Here are two bullets to add to this point:

• Evie believes in order to truly reap the benefits of Agile for a company, Agile needs to be adopted not only at team level but also the program level, portfolio level, and the organizational level. If not, dissonance between operating models among groups, misalignment of priorities, wasteful resource allocations, lack of cross-team coordination and communication, no clear understanding of overall progress, etc. can all happen. Scaling Agile up and equipping program level leaders with Agile mindset and know-how is an important opportunity area.
• Though certified and fully capable of running pure SAFe or LeSS, Evie has a practical approach when it comes to implementing Agile. Her thought leadership combined with her extensive Agile experiences allow her to evaluate the situation realistically and come up with strategic plans that fit into the organization’s context and priorities to achieve critical goals.  

On top of Evie’s Agile expertise, she has a strong technical background from her earlier software quality engineer years delivering complex, large-scale software products. Evie also stays up-to-date on modern technologies such as cloud computing, microservices, containers, CICD, and she is a certified AWS Solutions Architect.

As a transformational, growing leader, Evie has been honing in on her leadership skills from leading and managing multiple teams at technology companies while driving projects from start to finish. To futher improve her leadership capabilities, Evie spent 4 months completing 8 courses, and has earned High-Performance Leadership and Executive Leadership certificates from Cornell University in 2020.

Evie holds a Master of Science degree in Information Systems from Northeastern University, and a Bachelor of Economics in Finance degree from Xiamen University.