I have spent more than twenty-five years inside organizations where the stakes were high enough that getting it wrong had real consequences. Congressional oversight. Three million home loans. Benefits delivery that couldn't miss a cycle. A school board that had to trust someone before they would move.
The first thing I look for is not PMO maturity or the state of the project plan. It is where the seam is, where delivery accountability ends and adoption accountability begins, and what is falling through the gap. That gap is almost always where the problem lives.
An organization that understands its own integration failure is already most of the way to fixing it.
Experience
Four worlds. One toolkit.
Stood up the EPMO from scratch. Built the portfolio infrastructure, governance model, and oversight framework for 16 strategic programs totaling $1.6B under congressional scrutiny.
Owned the master program schedule for the WaMu acquisition, a migration of 3 million home loans where every sequencing decision carried zero tolerance for service disruption.
Engaged as a consultant and embedded as a program manager within the FGBS Tax PMO. Led defined workstreams across tax compliance initiatives spanning 25 jurisdictions. A consulting engagement throughout, never an employee.
Owned the full engagement lifecycle: contracts, vendors, requirements, configuration, change management, and digitization.
DOH Operations Director, reported to the Secretary. Project and consulting roles across DNR, L&I, DSHS, ESD, and HCA. A decade inside state government where regulatory timelines were not optional.
EPMO Program Manager at a mid-size insurance carrier, helping establish and mature portfolio governance from the inside: the operating model, stage-gate governance, investment scoring, and an 84-project portfolio dashboard.
Most practitioners work in one of these. State government, or federal, or enterprise, or education. One methodology. One domain. The combination, earned as both employee and consultant, is unusual, and it is why the same playbook holds in all of them.
Published Framework
What 25+ years of governance work produced.
Waypoint is a 12-step practitioner field guide for building EPMO governance in organizations that have none. It is not a summary of theory. It is a codification of what actually works, drawn from federal agencies, financial institutions, global enterprises, and state governments where the stakes were high enough that getting it wrong had real consequences.
Each step exists because the one before it creates the conditions the next requires. The sequence is not arbitrary. Organizations that skip steps produce governance theater: scoring models nobody trusts, tollgates that are checkbox exercises, and oversight boards nobody brings real problems to. The sequence is a dependency chain, and the chain is the practice.
“The framework is not a methodology to be licensed. It is a field guide to be used. Every template exists because I needed it and it did not exist. Every step exists because skipping it produced a failure I witnessed or owned.”
Let us talk
PMO and portfolio leadership. EPMO stand-ups, governance builds, and portfolio turnarounds. Permanent, contract, or interim. Olympia, Washington, and open to remote.