Rob has over thirty years experience on technical system and solution design, development and delivery projects in multiple domains including land and property administration, flight plan filing and pre-flight briefings, airline crew scheduling, insurance estimating, satellite ground stations, weather systems, remote sensing and marine security with over twenty years in a technical project management role. Rob is a co-founder of EyeOnBoard, a yacht security and monitoring solution. From large government contracts in a prime contractor role to startup and small business operations, we have knowledge over a broad range of business models. Bring that experience to bear on your project in a review capacity, in a planning capacity, in process definition capacity, or in a pure management consulting capacity across the following project domains:
Project Governance
One of the most crucial elements to a successful endeavor is the framework by which consistent and effective decisions are made, and that timely and appropriate communications occur as a result. This is the heart of governance.
Quality and Risk Management
Its not enough to have a plan for success, there are always risks (and assumptions) that need to be defined, mitigated and routinely re-evaluated. And it is important to know how the project is actually performing, as measured against what the plan originally envisioned. Quality activities get built into project processes with periodic audits to verify compliance.
Software Development Life Cycles
Agile? Waterfall? And the many variants and combinations of both. Its a rare project that is purely Agile or purely Waterfall. And both require planning. Agile is not a free-for-all. In fact, Agile requires more discipline at smaller timescales than Waterfall and it can be much more nimble, but it necessarily comes with less long term predictability. There is no way around that. Its more about finding the right balance between appropriate feature planning (with reasonable scope/schedule/budget predictability) and being capable of reacting to much more dynamic needs (with only short term budget/schedule predictability).
Integration and Test
Only very small teams can produce bug-free releases straight out of development. As the code base and the team size grows, just ensuring the system continues to correctly do the things it has always done (and in a timely manner) becomes a daunting task. And of course, new features will impact pre-existing capabilities, changing the definition of “correct”. Add to that the demands of mobile, tablet and the more traditional desktop environments all with multiple browsers and versions. That adds up to the need to have a dedicated team and supporting technologies.
Transition and Commissioning
The fun really begins when its necessary for large, experienced (or not), groups of customers to begin to use new systems or features to accomplish real things. Commissioning is a moment in time where a well known set of capabilities begin to transact or operate for real, in the intended environment. Transition is the set of activities that precede and prepare for the act of commissioning. This can be almost trivial (like fixing a typographical error on a web site blog) to incredibly massive (switching millions of users onto a new banking system for example). An appropriate plan needs to be in place and managed, usually under extreme schedule pressure.
Operations and Support
This is where businesses are made (or broken). Its not enough for the system to do the right thing. It has to do the right thing consistently, in a timely manner, under load, and be able to fail gracefully and predictably when things go wrong. It must maintain an effective and current security posture in an ever-changing cyber threat environment. These capabilities are identified and developed as features in their own right during the development cycle, not added as an after thought to the commissioning plan, as reliability and availability requirements can have a significant impact on the design.
You can find out more about Rob on LinkedIn. Or contact us and we will send you Rob’s full resume.