My Mission

My personal mission is to help people create value, joy, and meaning in their work. I especially enjoy helping people discover and apply untapped talents to serve their deeply held values.

To put that mission into action, I offer consulting, facilitation, and training to inspire software people to become inspiring leaders.

My Consulting Approach

My goal is to help my clients achieve immediate benefits and build their own skills for future projects.

I work collaboratively with my clients. Together we focus on answering the three fundamental questions, and acting on our answers.

• What results do we want to create? I work with you and your team to define goals for significant, specific, measurable, tangible business benefits. Goals that are clear, compelling and challenging. Goals we can act on right now.

• How can we create the results we want? Goals in mind, we design high impact actions that move us significantly toward success. Specific, results-oriented actions that create immediate, tangible value. Then we act.

• What results are we creating? As we act, we observe the results of our actions, determine the meaning and significance of what we observe, and compare our results to our plans. We use what we are learning to design our next steps toward our goals. Through our work together, we achieve measurable benefits for you, your team members, and your organization. In addition, you and your team gain the skills, confidence, and motivation to continue making improvements.

My Background

I have worked in the software industry since 1980, as a developer, manager, process steward, and consultant. From 1995 to 1999, I consulted to IT and software product development organizations about software development, project management, and team and interpersonal effectiveness. From 1999 to 2002, I worked in Sun Microsystems' IT organization to define, promote, and support effective software development, project management, and leadership practices.

In 2000, I became interested in Agile Development techniques, and have since applied the Agile values of communication, feedback, simplicity, courage, and respect to all areas of software development and software process improvement, especially to the practices of leadership, management, and team effectiveness.

In 2004, I began collaborating with Elisabeth Hendrickson to help clients improve their unit testing, integration testing, and system testing processes. I am also privileged to teach Elisabeth's wonderful Creative Software Testing class.