Management consulting services for information governance

Most executives and senior managers don't have a full-time information systems expert on hand and don't need one anyway. However, from time to time, executives need answers to specific questions about:

  • The legal environment of business, as it pertains to managing their electronic information.
  • Office automation projects.
  • Content management projects (records management, document control).
  • When to upgrade and how far.
  • Online collaboration (Web conferencing, video conferencing, collaboration sites).
  • E-mail management and archiving.
  • Information security and safekeeping (including disaster recovery).

As one of the few people with doctoral-level training and in-depth experience in information governance, John is uniquely qualified to help business executives address these issues and enable the implementation of cost-effective solutions.

John's full resume is available in Acrobat format here.

Litigation support

Despite continuous improvement efforts over the past 50 years, information technology (IT) projects continue to exhibit substantial schedule/budget overruns, high defect rates, or both. In prior decades, most IT projects were developed in-house, but that picture has changed with the appearance of sophisticated off-the-shelf software and associated customization efforts, as well as outsourcing of custom IT efforts to external contractors.

In this new business environment, a project failure can trigger legal action with each side accusing the other of miscommunications, technical errors, and/or management errors. These disputes typically focus on one or more of the following:

  • Required system capabilities vs. delivered functionality.
  • The design, coding, and/or testing process of the developers.
  • The risk, schedule, and budget management processes of the project manager.
  • Configuration management, issue tracking, and/or quality assurance processes of the developer or vendor.

While "fact witnesses" are useful for testimony about actual events, that's not the entire picture. Someone needs to dig through the piles of technical documents and e-mail archives, assist in the interviewing of fact witnesses, understand all of the jargon and terminology, and synthesize a picture of the true environment and timeline of the project. John is the author of the Shell Method, an online, auditable software engineering process methodology template that covers all of the above issues in IT projects. As one of the few experts with broad-spectrum experience in implementing and executing auditable IT projects, John is uniquely qualified to evaluate IT projects ranging from lightweight to high rigor efforts.

Management consulting services for software engineering process improvement

John supports process improvement efforts for software quality assurance and quality management, including analysis of the regulatory environment, organizational policy development, procedures development, standards development, workflow planning, and training of development teams.

Support services in software and systems analysis, design, and documentation

These services include training and mentoring on-site personnel in the elicitation of requirements, technical systems analysis, database structure definition, business rules capture, and the corresponding development of requirements documentation, design documentation, test plans, implementation plans, and online help systems.

Assessments of software engineering processes and projects

Assessment services focus on identifying the current state of organizational or project-level software engineering process maturity and recommending activities for further process improvement. Assessments are intended to enable further process improvement.