My passion is accelerating team productivity by freeing teams from a hairball of technical and social difficulties. Although I’m retired now— focused on family, hiking and photography—I occasionally consult with management and coach teams.

Your team’s productivity certainly decelerates when technical difficulties enmesh with social difficulties. I help your team unsnarl, focus, and punch the productivity accelerator.

The following is a sample of what clients and colleagues say about me on LinkedIn:

If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of your technology teams (or any teams), Steve is the consultant for you.

Steve is awesome and smart.

Not only is he (Steve) creative and thought-provoking, but I found his ideas very “sticky.”

I like and trust Steve.

Before I retired, I was a member of SolutionsIQ, a consultancy committed to Agile values and principles, where I had the role of management consultant, team coach, public speaker and workshop leader. I am also a published author who writes essays about teamwork and effective management.

Let me share more about my background: I started my IT career in 1975 as a mainframe Systems Programmer for the State of Missouri. I worked the next six years for internal IT provider organizations in roles that included programmer, DBA and systems architect. During the bulk of my career, I worked primarily for two large IT suppliers—Amdahl and EMC—as a Systems Engineer, Technical Architect and Technical Business Consultant.

A clear lesson from over three decades in IT—assembling a group of smart technical people isn’t nearly enough to ensure success. I have worked as a member of many groups with incredibly smart people. But when the members worked exclusively as individuals rather than as teammates, the project was frustrating and the resulting product tended to displease the customer.

I’ve invested years learning how to successfully lead teams; how to explore requirements, how to make trade-off choices visible and make wise choices about them; how to manage and status projects; how to market products to customers; and, most importantly, how to access a team’s wisdom and knowledge, which is typically untapped, and use it to produce products that please the customer.

If your organization isn’t pleasing your customer, I can help you as your team explores, defines and solves the problems that are barriers to your success.