CAVU helps people and companies reach better career outcomes through transformative learning experiences. I have the honor of leading the team that is making all of this happen!

I help organizations challenge their assumptions and build great teams and great products. My focus is on how a culture of servant leadership, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking can help organizations outperform and grow. When you work with empowered teams, you can make faster decisions, experiment more, and stay ahead in a brutal business world. We know that it takes a lot of bad ideas to find a good idea, and a lot of good ideas to find a great idea, so we must try more things to stay ahead. I help companies learn how to do that.

As a Partner Coach, I work with a leading team of Scrum coaches to support large scale, enterprise level Scrum transformations.

CARES is an ambitious undertaking of the State of Alabama’s Department of Human Resources, Public Health and Medicaid to create a single, integrated eligibility system. As Deputy Program Director at CARES, I was responsible for building an agile software development team of over 100 individuals tasked with the development of a state-wide eligibility system. This involved building a scrum-based software development lifecycle; identifying means to improve communications and understanding across multiple teams working on a single, enterprise level system; and working to build a strong agile software development culture, while simultaneously navigating an organization through a rapid startup and maturation phase.I worked hand-in-hand with the Director to create program policy and process; plan and manage a $60+ million-dollar budget; build best-practice recruitment, hiring and employee development practices; and build and follow a strategic plan for organizational growth and maturity. At CARES, we focused on building a leading approach to software development that introduced single team scrum, scaled scrum (using the LeSS framework), DevOps practice, and CI/CD approaches to the state of Alabama. These approaches stand as a model in how state governments can build advanced enterprise IT solutions without the involvement of outside systems integrators. In two years, CARES grew from two people to over 100 people and 10 teams working that were able to handle weekly releases of multiple enterprise systems while working closely with key stakeholders to continuously improve processes and deliverables.

As Principal Investigator with The University of Alabama’s Center for Advanced Public Safety, I was responsible for building a consulting practice focused on Health and Human Services applied research. During this time, I developed strategic initiatives that aligned with the overall strategic plan of the center and grew from a single project to over 12 projects totaling in $1.45 million dollars in research expenditures in just 3 years.Additionally, I was responsible for hiring software engineers, building a retention plan for those employees and creating a culture of open communications and innovation.While doing this, I also worked on several research and development initiatives including advanced data mining, machine learning and visualization techniques that were applied to various eGovernment solutions for the Alabama Department of Public Health and the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

At NHS Management, I began as a software developer focusing on the management and implementation of an enterprise level electronic medical records system that supported a geographically diverse system of long term care facilities with over 5,000 patients and 1,000 nurses, doctors and office staff.During my time there, I grew my position to include working with the Chief Nursing Officer, the Chief Financial Officer and the Director of Accounts Receivable to build integrated solutions for improving daily operations across a variety of eHealth areas of focus. This included envisioning, designing and building an advanced decision support system that provided near-real-time analysis of patient health, nurse performance and census management.

Bates Enterprises, Inc. is a small business focused on providing recycling and safety management for the automotive industry. Being a small business, my focus ranged from managing a million-dollar IT budget to building a team of marketing and sales personnel to develop a comprehensive branding and marketing strategy that increased the value of the corporate brand and generated awareness throughout a variety of industrial sectors.While there, I supported the executive team in identifying technical and marketing solutions to decrease product cost and increase profit margin across all product areas.Finally, I was responsible for designing, architecting and managing the development of a factory floor automation system that integrated with multiple business support systems to develop a comprehensive enterprise resource planning system for a 50 employee industrial service provider.

Designed and built a central control system that allowed for the maintenance and operation of multiple water and waste water facilities from a variety of remote user interfaces.Implemented an advanced “self-healing” algorithm that was able to automatically resolve a variety of water and waste water plant systems failures by detecting a failure, diagnosing the problem and using an expert system to resolve the issue. Integrated advanced remote visualization techniques to support the reduction of third shift positions that significantly reduced city expenditures.