After college I got a systems analyst job and enjoyed that for a few years. I went back to school for a Master of Science from the University of Michigan School of Information.

During grad school, I started doing project-based work, and I haven’t looked back. I spent 10 years as an independent technical consultant with emphasis on applying UX methods to increase the value of working software—my ‘changesets for dollars’ era. Eventually I got tired of developing software that didn’t consistently make a dent in my clients’ organizations. Software is only sometimes the answer.

This interest in outcomes led me to learn about applying lean and continuous improvement methods in a variety of larger organizations. For the next 5 years, I worked alongside clients in the public and nonprofit sectors, using and mutating continuous improvement methods to directly benefit the public. Finally, over the most recent 5 years, I’ve practiced additional skills, including approaches to organizational development, change management, and ways to link strategy to measurement.

What I enjoy most about the work is helping people uncover mutually beneficial—often surprising—solutions to big problems. These solutions often originate from employees with lower status; I celebrate when their insights are heard, acknowledged, and realized. I look for ways of communicating and planning that take the usual bullshit, turn it upside down, and use it as fertile soil to grow something new.

I led an agency’s lean transformation across a two-year period. With new executive leadership, a wave of retirements in upper management, and policy changes mandating urgent adjustments to their services, the agency was running behind and had a huge backlog of service requests.

Our work started with an agency-wide improvement activity that reduced their backlog of overdue requests from 40,000 to zero in two months, while letting staff practice designing and running rapid improvements in a complex, highly regulated environment. I hosted a series of iterative workshops as they transitioned from an in-person service model to a call center, and reduced their callback rate from 14% to 1%. Staff improved timeliness and compliance of key processes across 5 sites. I trained a cohort of 20 lean champions who took over the agency’s lean efforts after the consulting project ended.

Marketing and technical teams inside a large corporation were at loggerheads. They had developed an advanced machine learning capability to make sense of customer activity and make recommendations to their sellers. The program was successful technically, but coordination and agreement did not come easily.

I managed a business process reset on behalf of dozens of decision-makers and managers across teams to plan and run their shared work around this program. Working with data scientists, we developed ways of explaining tricky machine learning concepts and system behaviors to sales and marketing teams. And working with marketing, we created a deliberative structure so they could identify what was important to them, come to agreement as a group, and share their requirements with data scientists. This new operating model eventually became the basis for division-wide project selection and planning.