About
Twenty-eight years of making complicated systems behave.
I started in knowledge management at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1998 and have spent the years since in the same place, whatever the industry: between the people who decide what a system should do and the people who have to build it.
What I care about is the part most teams treat as overhead: the guardrails. Who is allowed to do this, on what authority, and can you prove it afterward. Build that in from the start and everything else moves faster — including, now, the AI agents doing a growing share of the work.
I work independently now, from Lubbock, Texas, mostly on six-month engagements.
Background
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2026 – present
Independent practice
Platform architecture, governance and compliance engineering, and AI-orchestrated delivery. Advisory, fractional leadership, and scoped builds.
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2022 – 2026
Quext — Head of Systems & Software
Systems architecture, AI platform strategy and cross-team execution for a multifamily SaaS ecosystem — leasing, payments, IoT, integrations, identity, data. Arrived in 2022 as an integrations engineer and grew into the role. Agile Release Train Engineer alongside it.
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2005 – 2022
Texas Tech University
Seventeen years, ending as Senior Director for Student Success & Retention. Four enterprise platforms serving 283 stakeholder groups; a capability maturity model across siloed units; and, during a pandemic hiring freeze that left the department without a programmer, an advisor assignment engine I taught myself PHP and MySQL to build.
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1998 – 2005
PricewaterhouseCoopers and e-business consulting
Knowledge management, then e-business consulting — where the habit started of standing between the people deciding what a system should do and the people who have to build it.
Education
Rhetoric, and the problem of many readers
Doctoral coursework and research in rhetoric and technical communication at Texas Tech, on how writers have historically anticipated more than one audience at once — and how a single communication can be made to land with several of them. I finished the coursework, got deep into the research, and then decided the credential wasn’t what would define the work. So I went back to applying it.
That question turned out to be the one I kept solving anyway: one capability contract rendering for web, Android and iOS; one policy decision presented differently depending on who is asking; one architecture that has to be true for executives, engineers and the people using it on a Tuesday. An MBA in Management Information Systems and Organizational Behavior from UT Dallas came first — the systems half and the people half, deliberately.
Leading teams
I run Lencioni’s framework as an operating blueprint, not a culture exercise.
Roughly eighty developers across multiple agile teams over the past four years, in several time zones. The framework is how that held together.
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Trust — enough vulnerability that people can adapt to something new, AI included, without ego getting in the way.
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Productive conflict — unfiltered argument about architecture and tooling, because that is how the robust answer surfaces.
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Active commitment — once a decision is made, everyone moves, without passing the buck or leaving holes for someone else.
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Peer accountability — the team holds its own standard for quality and reliability, rather than waiting for me to.
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Collective results — every advance tied back to measurable business value. Substantially and actually and now.
It is the same conviction that runs through the systems: a team that can say hard things to each other, and software that reports what it cannot verify. Neither works if anyone is performing confidence they don’t have.
How I work
On the ground first
I want time with the people doing the work before I write anything down. Diagnoses made from a dashboard tend to be wrong in expensive ways.
Plainly told
You’ll hear what I actually think, including when the answer is that you don’t need me.
Built to outlast me
The point is a team that can run it after the engagement ends, not a dependency on the consultant who set it up.
Worth a conversation?
Tell me what you’re trying to move and I’ll tell you whether I’m the right help.