My Work
Helping organizations move between capability plateaus
After 30 years experiencing the pain of compliance within regulated industries, I've noticed the same pattern everywhere: organizations get stuck. Not because they lack talent or ambition, but because the system itself — the organization, the processes, the tools, the compliance architecture — creates drag. My work is about diagnosing where that drag comes from and designing the path to the next plateau of flow.
Unifying Theme
Flow across four dimensions
These are the dimensions I've learned to watch. They're interconnected — improving one without addressing the others just moves the bottleneck.
Systems Architecture
Designing for flow. How the product architecture, the development system, and the organizational structure align — or don't. This is the structural foundation everything else sits on.
Currently applied as: SDV architecture, product line engineering, variant management
Business Process Improvement
Fixing broken flow. Identifying where ceremony replaces value, where handoffs create waste, and where process exists for its own sake rather than to serve the work.
Currently applied as: ASPICE coaching, compliance architecture, continuous improvement
Technology Blueprinting
Enabling flow through tooling. Knowing which tool combinations accelerate development and which create friction. Architecture of the digital thread from requirements through validation.
Currently applied as: ALM transformation (Codebeamer), toolchain architecture, digital thread
Organizational Design
Structuring humans for optimal flow. Usually the biggest blocker — wrong roles, wrong reporting lines, coordination overhead killing velocity. Conway's Law in action, every time.
Currently applied as: Org redesign for software-defined products, team topology, coordination cost analysis
The Pattern
What blocks the path to the next plateau
The blockers between plateaus fall into the same four categories almost every time. The mix varies by organization, but the categories don't. After enough time in the field, at the gemba, you start to see the terrain before anyone describes it. It all comes down to "capability blindness" across four dimensions.
Compliance Gaps
Don't meet the standard, don't know the shortest path to get there. Especially common in organizations transitioning from mechanical to software-defined products.
Organizational Structure
Wrong roles, wrong reporting lines, coordination overhead killing flow. Almost always the biggest blocker, and the one leadership is most reluctant to address.
Poor Process
Ceremony without value, handoffs creating waste, no continuous flow. Often the symptom that gets treated while the structural cause goes unaddressed.
Disconnected Tooling
No digital thread. Manual traceability. Disconnected toolchains where information dies at system boundaries. The technology layer that should enable flow but instead fragments it.
How I Think About This
Diagnose. Guide. Learn. Repeat. Scale.
Discovery
Understand motivation. Assess the current plateau. Identify the blockers. Structured assessment frameworks — including AI-augmented diagnostics — turn ambiguity into clarity.
Delivery
Guide toward the next plateau using models, methods, and tools built from decades of pattern recognition. Reusable architecture models adapted to context. Not templates — judgment.
Knowledge Capture
What worked and what didn't feeds back into the models. Every experience makes the thinking sharper. The practice evolves to the tao of the craft because the learning never stops.
Recognize your organization in any of this?
That's usually how the conversation starts. Someone reads something here and thinks "that's us." Happy to talk about what the path forward might look like.
Let's Talk