Ask the Author

There are five types of readers who can gain the most value from this book. 

• Project managers, PMO directors, technical leads, and executives who oversee technical programs or complex projects and seek pragmatic, standards-aligned guidance to improve delivery and team performance.
• Early to mid-career professionals have the most to gain from reading Optimizing High-Performance Teams. In my professional experience, I have learned that the knowledge curve is drastically reduced by looking at leading practices, and, more importantly, looking at what things did not go as expected. This is while Agile is so successful. One of the most important part of any agile program is the retrospective covered in several places in the book. 
• General – Project Management Reference. One of the things I like about consulting is that, like entrepreneurship, there are always a number of areas available to explore. You may manage a technical project in telecommunications one year and another in a healthcare engagement. Sometimes you may need to help out on a business development “selling a new project” or have to migrate data. Some industries require more rigorous QA/Risk Management components to their solutions. By taking a look across all of these various components, the book provides where someone new in that area can start to gain more knowledge and get up to speed more quickly, making them more effective in their job.
• General – Career Management. There are tips on time management and career management applicable to anyone. For example, the chapter on Transition Management, although it addresses transitioning on and off of a program, the same tips can be used for anyone exploring opportunities in the workplace. This includes the importance of building a routine and it even provides a sample two-week plan of activities to help with an individualized job search approach. 
• Professors/Instructors: The book can be used as a supplemental teaching aid in program and project management courses. The material is intentionally written to be an authoritative and teachable reference. Organized around the full project lifecycle and ten discrete domains (Program Management Office, Business Development, Recruitment, Integration, Communication, Requirements, Solution Development, Security, Information Dissemination, Operations & Maintenance), the book maps cleanly to weekly modules, seminar topics, or course units.

I have always been interested in writing and giving back to the community. In the summer of 2025, I was fortunate enough to have both of my daughters staying with us for the summer. We decided to take the opportunity to finish and publish the book so that others could benefit from the lessons learned throughout my career. 

Optimizing High-Performance Teams differs from other project management titles in that it provides guidance on tactical techniques that an individual can use to get things done. I include personal anecdotes along the way to drive key points across by relating concepts to practical application. The book compliments many of the other general project management books that offer the standard process and templates by including practical implementation of leading practice process and templates and providing guidance on where to go to study more on the ten areas of program and project management covered in the book. For example, most project management books may indicate that you need to have a transition plan and what a transition plan is. Optimizing High-Performance Teams takes it a step further to help the individual (and program support team) by providing specific steps a person can take when transitioning projects. Guidance like the personal retrospective and building a routine plan helps any individual achieve the right mental state for pending job search or changes.

A reader can immediately use the information to conduct the included team maturity assessment. Using the information from the assessment, they can develop a prioritized roadmap targeting one to three high-impact process or staffing changes to implement over the next quarter.

For those who are looking to change jobs or are in between jobs, the chapter on transitioning provides information on establishing a routine that allows you to continue your journey. The focus is on completing activities that you can control.

At this stage in my career, I have some say in the types of projects I manage. Before accepting a position, it is important that I understand the mission of the organization, the objective of the supporting programs or directives, and a bit about the management team who I will be working closely with to achieve the mission.

On projects of any size it is important that the leader communicates well. In many of the projects I have managed, there were critical resources that did not report directly to me. Managing with a servant leadership style, my objective is to make everyone else on the team as successful as possible. This includes providing team members with the training, tools, and motivation they require to do their jobs and remove any constraints/obstacles. Working with the team to routinely explore continuous improvement opportunities is a critical part of driving the team’s success.

As mentioned in the Foreword, when someone asks me what are common traits of high-performing technical team members that I manage, I answer with the following 7 traits:
• Strong Work Ethic – someone who takes ownership and is committed to completing their work aligned with the mission.
• Trust: someone who trust that others on the team will stick to their commitments and, likewise, they are hyper focused on sticking to their commitments. They act ethically in all interactions and expect the same for their teammates
• Enlightened: someone who seeks understanding of the full picture and how their work fits in the overall solution
• Active Listener: someone who listens at least twice as much as they talk
• Proactive Participation: someone who actively participates in any meeting and is not afraid to respectfully disagree or share opinions
• Empathy: someone who seeks to understand others point of views
• Communication: someone who confirms that the message received by their audience is the message they intended

Not at all. One of the points of the book is that every person’s journey is unique. Any team benefits by having different perspectives which include education levels. 

The reason we need this book is that many people do not know the best references to help them to maximize their growth in their chosen profession. Technical Project Management is complex and, on larger consultant-based programs, an individual may be tasked to taking on various roles without much guidance. This reference book acts as a guide so that any professional can skip to the pertinent section and start to discover acronyms, terms, definitions and learn about industry groups so that they can begin their journey in the specific topic. For those life-long learners out there, it provides a way to increase your knowledge more quickly by someone who spent a career determining the most efficient process across a program lifecycle.

>Yes, absolutely. The framework used in Optimizing High-Performance Teams is based on having a standard, repeatable process that includes continuous improvement and learning like many of the principles found in Agile project management. This framework is scalable for organizations of any size.

Good question. To effectively run a PMO there must be meetings. One of my mentors early in my career said that an individual should prefer to attend meetings than going to the movies. I thought, how could that be? He went on to explain that, unlike a movie, with a meeting you have a direct effect on the outcomes. The challenge with most meetings, is that they may not be well facilitated. Communication is over 80% of a project manager’s job and the chapter on communication provides tips in this area. Every meeting should have a specific objective, and it is the facilitator’s job to keep everyone’s interest. I recently read an article where someone said that the facilitator should not be the primary speaker as the intent is to engage the participants. It is both an art and science where the facilitator has to know their audience, what drives each individual, and how to best engage multiple personality types.