About
I am a technology leader with more than 30 years of experience delivering large-scale enterprise systems in financial services and consulting. I currently serve as a Program Manager in Technology at Northern Trust in Chicago, where I lead global engineering teams responsible for a front-office, client facing treasury management system.
Over the last decade I have become a specialist in something most people would find difficult: turning around large, failing technology programs and successfully replatforming legacy systems that other teams had struggled or outright failed to deliver. Time and again I have been told it could not be done — and time and again I have led the team to completion anyway.
While at Northern Trust I led two major platform turnarounds. I spent six years leading the replatforming of a mission-critical SWIFT gateway supporting more than 60 enterprise financial systems — a modernization effort that had failed multiple times before our team finished it. I then led the modernization of a client-facing treasury platform, delivering a modern cloud-based system while managing the retirement of its legacy predecessor.
Before Northern Trust I spent five years at UBS Global Asset Management, leading Agile delivery of a global risk system modernization and serving as an Agile methodology trainer for UBS North America. And before that I spent 13 years running Chicago Technologies Group, my own boutique consulting firm, delivering custom enterprise software for clients including Citadel, Valence Health, and Cintas.
Agile is more than a methodology to me — it is the lens through which I think about delivery, leadership, and continuous improvement. That is what this blog is about: the real-world application of Agile values and principles in the kinds of large, complex environments where the textbook version rarely survives first contact.
When I am not thinking about software delivery, you will find me on the golf course. It turns out that patience, incremental improvement, and honest self-assessment matter just as much there as they do in technology.
