As an experienced software professional with over two decades of experience; I started as a self-taught software developer and became a software engineer around 2015. With my formal education in software product management, I am excited to provide project management services for technology and IT projects. My extensive background gives me unique insights into contributing factor for project success or failure, and I am confident that expertise will bring client projects to successful completion.
There’s great value in an unbiased, third-party project manager. Technology teams may hesitate to acknowledge potential delays or limitations, while project sponsors may be reluctant to adjust unrealistic timelines or scope. As an independent facilitator, I provide an objective assessment of project status, identify potential issues before they become major problems, and help teams navigate challenging situations.
My experience spans various aspects of software development, including agile methodologies, waterfall approaches, and hybrid models tailored to specific client needs. I have honed my skills through hands-on involvement in numerous successful projects and have learned valuable lessons from those that did not go as planned. By leveraging these experiences, I can offer guidance on best practices for project planning, execution, monitoring, and delivery.
To supplement my practical knowledge, I have completed formal training in software product management through Coursera’s MicroMasters program. This comprehensive education has equipped me with a solid foundation in project management principles, tools, and techniques, ensuring that I can deliver high-quality results for clients. My formal education is complemented by excellent real-world experience in both large and small tech projects.
One of the most valuable but often overlooked things a project/product manager can do is identify and manage risk. The risk of missed deadlines, the risk of mismatched requirements, information security risk, user adoption risk, change management, etc. My 20 years’ experience in insurance & risk management, my education in adventure tourism, and my experience in Search & Rescue has all focused on all aspects of risk management. As a project manager I will help you understand what could go wrong, now & in the future, the frequency & severity of exposure, and mitigation options. Projects and progress cannot happen without some level of risk!
At the core of my project management philosophy lies a commitment to social responsibility, ethics, transparency, and doing the right thing. I believe in managing risk and delivering anti-fragile project outcomes on time, within budget, and within scope.
I am passionate about technology and project management and am always eager to help. It’s my pleasure to provide free initial consultations/meetings where we can discuss project requirements, identify stakeholders, and understand the current state versus the desired future state. It’s my goal to provide immediate value in these free early consultations.
Let’s get the conversation started!
Helpful Software & Project Terminology:
anti-fragile
Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers.
The concept of antifragile is the opposite of the fragile! A fragile thing such as a package of wine glasses is easily broken when dropped but an antifragile object would benefit from such stress. So rather than marking such a box with “Handle with Care”, it would be labelled “Please Mishandle” and the wine would get better with each drop (would be awesome wouldn’t it).
Anti-fragility is also a very good risk management technique of identifying early & often how something might fail and building in resilience from the outset.
Definition of done
The definition of done (DoD) is when all conditions, or acceptance criteria, that a software product must satisfy are met and ready to be accepted by a user, customer, team, or consuming system.
It’s important and valuable to define “done” (in terms of tickets, bugs, tasks, and the overall project) before embarking on a project to avoid confusion or discussion mid-project.
Stand-up/Scrum
The daily scrum, also called the standup, is a short daily meeting designed to let the team plan out its work for the day and identify any obstacles that could impact that work. Most teams hold these meetings in the morning and limit them to 10 or 15 minutes.
It’s important in these meetings for staff to identify road-blocks early on to have stakeholders remove those road-blocks early and for staff to identify as soon as possible if deadlines are requirements are not going to be met.
Critical Path
Critical path method (CPM) is a resource-utilization algorithm for scheduling a set of project activities. The essential technique for using CPM is to construct a model of the project that includes a list of all tasks required to complete the project, the dependencies between the tasks, and the estimate of time (duration) that each activity will take to complete. With this information, you can determine the critical path by identifying the longest stretch of dependent activities and measuring them from start to finish.