About


With 10+ years of experience I have a proven track record in traditional project & program management, and also as an accomplished Agilist. Having cut my teeth on the software development life cycle, I've completed projects related to web applications, IT infrastructure, digital publishing, streaming content delivery, and broadcast technology. At current count I have led nearly 20 teams, consisting of both operations and engineering, through successful Agile transformations. A pragmatist, I tailor my approach, informed by best practices, company policy, and the needs of the team.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exceeding Banality of Burning Projects

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Listening to a podcast recently I heard a project manager say of himself that he is often given the project that are "already on fire." I cringed, because I have made that comment myself quite a few times. Too often it was in interviews that I made the boast. It's not really that remarkable for a project manager to be handed a project on fire and asked to make something of it.  There are many reasons for a project to be "going south," and it's going to show time, cost, scope, and possibly, ultimately, quality. One such project for me was a cloud migration. A major data center was being shut down and all the services hosted there had to be migrated to the cloud. When I got involved it was already badly behind schedule, and extra cost had been incurred in renewing the lease on a data center's space while also paying for cloud services. What had happened was a project manager had laid out a very solid plan for doing the migration in waves. It was going to i
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Agile for Non-Engineering Teams

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It was really a pretty large group we gathered for an introduction to Agile, and none of them were software developers. This was several years ago now at a major media company where I had been recently promoted to program manager. A senior scrum master was assisting me with the training portion for the archivists who were part of my newly-formed program group. They were going to be part of an Agile transformation that would range from them through the streaming partnership team and on to broadcast engineers. And, importantly, almost none of them had ever heard of Agile before.  Some might wonder why we even bothered with an Agile transformation for such a group. The answer is that 1) we weren't forcing it on them, 2) we really believed it would help, and 3) the PMO was answering a call to help the entire organization become Agile, if possible. It turns out that Agile practices, Jira, and a bunch of librarians combines marvelously. It was something of a wonder how well and quickly t
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An Example of Grade vs. Quality

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In the world of project management, which has been my professional area for over 10 years at this point, I learned very early on about the difference between grade and quality. The PMBOK Guide, the central tome of project management, defines grade in part as "a category assigned to deliverables having the same functional use but different technical characteristics." Clear as mud, right? Quality, for its part, refers to conformance to requirements and fitness for use. To explain the difference, let me tell you about my food dehydrator. November of last year (2021) I brought some pears back from my trip home to Missouri. Realizing that I couldn't eat them all, even baking two pies from them, I ordered a food dehydrator so I could save some for later snacking. I found one online with nearly 5 starts and plenty of positive reviews. It's a straightforward device, which can sit on my kitchen countertop, and which has a few racks so layers of fruit can be dried at the same t
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