Person standing on a glass floor looking down at mountains — Photo Credit: Reuters/Robert Pratta

Bring me in to assess status, resolve thorny issues, or blast through some tricky work. See the links at the bottom for free “lessons learned” advice.

Local government IT projects suffer from the same issues as all IT Projects, plus additional ones.

High turnover rates in government mean that the department project team has probably never been through this type of implementation before.
Convoluted government procurement meant that too much time was spent on box-checking during the contract, and not enough focus on needs analysis.
Vendors bid work on a best-case scenario due to competitive pricing.

Ask me to describe my career and “Business Analyst” is still the phrase I fall back on. My early career was a series of Advantage Financial (ERP) implementations for State and Local government. I led meetings, documented issues (and designed solutions), broke apart interfaces, built conversions, trained users, and wrote documentation. You can read about some of my lessons learned in those areas below.

From 2013 - 2024, as IT Director, I managed a series of software projects for the City of Urbana. I arrived at the City to find a mainframe-based organization with custom green-screen solutions for every need. During my time, we replaced every one of them with standard (and maintainable!) solutions that address the needs of a modern city.

In short: I know software projects.

Plug me in to projects to assess status, resolve nasty issues, and help with disasters. Here’s a four-step process we’ll follow to assess where you stand:

1. Define ‘success’ – what are you trying to achieve?

2. Identify assumptions, dependencies, and interfaces.

3. Use scenarios to identify problems and issues threatening success.

4. Develop actions to address the findings.

Here are some of my lessons-learned blogs on project topics: