Lily Chong

Lily Chong is a Senior Director of PMO. She has been in the computer industry for more than 29 years.  She started using SCRUM in 2007 after almost 8 years of using waterfall project management when she was still working at Electronic Arts, Inc. and always feeling like she could do better.  Without any formal training, Lily picked up the Scrum and XP from the Trenches guide (http://infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-fromthe-trenches) and read through it then dove right in with her team.  After the first sprint, the Retrospective with the team showed that everyone was on board with this new method of project scheduling and commitments, feeling that things are already getting better.  After running SCRUM for about 15 months, Lily went and got certified as a true SCRUM Master.  After the class, Lily realized she was implementing Scrum, but...  The SCRUM Certification class was very informative and Lily recommends that everyone get certified when they decide to start scrumming rather than waiting as long as she did.  Lily went back to EA and implemented SCRUM with her team starting with backlog grooming.  Lily is still using SCRUM with her projects now that she is working as a Senior Director of PMO at a flight data company. She has been trying out her hand at Kanban instead of Scrum for her agile teams and sees the flexibility Kanban offers when there aren't predefined commitments and the queue is always full for the team to work through.

Before working at FlightAware (now a part of the Raytheon Technologies family), Lily worked as a project management consultant with SF Appworks for around 6 months then ChaiOne for over a year. Before that, Lily was at EA for 13 years rising from a junior manager to a senior director.  Before that, she worked with Netscape Communications (now Time Warner) for 3 years and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) for 4 years as a Software Engineer.