Principal Consultant/Owner
2012 - PRESENTLean Effect, LLC- Served as a consultant for senior leaders to plan and execute Lean/Agile/Scrum transitions.
- Provided Agile coaching for program/product managers, team product owners/analysts, functional leaders, enterprise architects, delivery teams, and individual contributors.
- Managed technical projects for Agile, traditional, and hybrid project/product teams for large and small companies co-located and distributed.
- Advised on establishing portfolio management and product roadmaps aligned with Agile release plans.
- Collaborated with clients, including Starbucks, TransAct, University of Washington, Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, Premera Blue Cross, and Kaiser Permanente Washington.
Senior Consultant
2011 - 2012Net Objectives, Inc.- Trained and coached small to Fortune 500 clients to begin or scale Scrum/Kanban/hybrid development.
- Developed Scrum/Kanban transition roadmaps aligned with business strategies in partnership with senior leaders.
- Collaborated internally with Net Objectives CEO and other consultants to improve sales and marketing.
- Worked with a variety of clients including ADP Dealer Services, CarMax, University of Iowa Foundation, and Microsoft.
Director of Software Development (reported to CEO)
2008 - 2011Tecplot, Inc.- Introduced Agile practices resulting in more frequent releases, higher quality, reduced technical debt and improved employee morale.
- Shipped high-performance, cross-platform C++ and Java desktop, web and SDK visual analysis products to thousands of demanding scientific and engineering users around the world.
- Challenged executives and developers to focus product and technology strategies to address sagging revenue, resulting in the release of a bold new product and architecture.
- Organized and coached team members resulting in the emergence of new leaders, more productive local teams and a successful new offshore team.
- Introduced UX designer into the organization, establishing accountabilities and collaborations among roles.
- Collaborated with peer executives and their teams to establish product development process resulting in alignment from business plan to code.
Independent Contractor/Owner
2002 - 2008Sebring Software, Inc.- Served as technical project manager/Scrum Master for a data warehouse replacement project.
- Led a mission-critical gas pipeline scheduling system upgrade as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach.
- Oversaw engineering team as Acting Engineering Manager for the lead team on complex (six global engineering teams, four business units) replacement of Microsoft's license management system.
- Headed the performance improvement effort to scale Expedia's back-end hotel payment processing as the technical program manager.
Director of Software Engineering
2000 - 2002Solucient, LLC- Transformed disheartened legacy desktop coders into disciplined web software engineers.
- Led architecture and process improvements to rapidly develop new n-tier Web reporting and data warehouse applications for multiple business units.
- Collaborated with peer departments to advance corporate initiatives including mergers and acquisitions which grew revenue from $30M to $130M in a single year.
- Launched post-merger team to develop portal-based platform resulting in streamlined user experience and reduced development costs for multiple products.
- Led cross-functional team and architecture design resulting in lower operational costs and on-time delivery for multiple internal customers.
Engineering Manager
1998 - 2000Sierra On-Line- Launched new team and processes to automate builds for dozens of software titles.
- Coached small team of entry-level developers to increase engineering discipline and meet demanding schedules of multiple internal customers.
- Led successful C++ rewrite of $20M consumer application (Print Artist) after two earlier teams’ failures.
- Architected automated build, code quality, and install systems.
- Improved development processes, coached developers, and coordinated with other teams.