I’ve developed my leadership style over my 25+ year career in IT and in the military by observing and working with leaders and managers, both good and bad, and learning by example. In my current role, I lead very skilled and experienced software developers, and I embrace the concept of servant-leadership with my teams. My job is to trust their technical decisions while making sure they understand requirements from the userbase, to achieve consensus for technical decisions, to remove impediments to their progress, to ensure they have the resources needed, and to hold their work accountable to the OSUCCC for the quality which is our standard.

My teams have a combined portfolio of 15 applications supporting the OSUCCC administration, OSU Medical Center marketing, and cancer researchers. Since joining the OSUCCC in 2016, we’ve completely refreshed our portfolio bringing online 15 new applications and retiring 10. My goal as portfolio manager is to provide the maximum output of functionality and support by understanding business needs, deadlines, team capabilities and allocate resources to projects in the most efficient way, including make-or-buy analysis.

I’m a PMP and Agile certified project manager. Being both a certified project manager and technical contributor, I bring a unique perspective to projects. I believe that project management processes support the creation of new functionality, and as such a project only needs as much project management as necessary, and the amount of project management needed varies by project. For most projects, our teams embrace Agile practices and are guided by the Scrum framework. Other projects which are bigger in scope and complexity need more formal project management processes than what the Scrum framework provides. My overall goal as a project manager is to deliver new functionality, meeting our quality standards, while communicating with stakeholders about the progress and any impediments to our work.

Managing our software development processes is a team effort for the OSUCCC software development teams. Our developers understand requirements from our institution such as our security and accessibility standards, and ensure those requirements are part of the development process. Our developers are also learning new tools and technologies to evaluate if they can be leveraged by our teams, and are given autonomy to try those new tools and technology and report back to our team about their potential. We embrace curiosity and innovation.

Though I’ve never been a full-time software developer, software development has always been part of my job, and part which I’ve enjoyed. If a technology solution required a custom software component, there’s always the choice of make or buy. I like having the ability to create and develop software myself when needed. Similar to an industrial operation requiring a good fabrication and machining shop, a comprehensive IT management organization needs a good software development shop. In my current role, my software development efforts are in data modeling and development of prototypes and proof-of-concept applications which are then turned over to my development teams to create applications based on those prototypes or concepts.

My first applications were written using Pascal with the Delphi IDE to connect with Oracle databases. At the time (the mid and late 90’s) Delphi was superior to Microsoft products for simple to moderately complex Windows Application Development. As years went by , NET progressed to be a robust development platform. My current software development platforms are .NET MVC, WebAPIs, various front end frameworks (Angular, Blazor, Vue.js), and SQL Server. You can view some of my hobby development projects on GitHub .