There's a particular kind of program management that doesn't get talked about much: the work of building something an organization has never built before. Not inheriting a PMO. Not optimizing an existing process. Building the infrastructure itself — the governance, the workflows, the data systems, the cross-functional trust — while simultaneously delivering results to stakeholders who aren't sure yet what "success" looks like.
That's been my career. At NOAA, I led the metadata-focused teams within NCEI (National Centers for Environmental Information) that were a core part of the broader OneStop initiative — the agency's enterprise-wide effort to make environmental data discoverable and machine-accessible at scale. I owned product and delivery leadership for CoMET, the metadata automation tool built for NCEI that became the operational backbone of that work. CoMET was subsequently adopted across NESDIS — the parent organization overseeing NCEI — and by NASA. The workflows we built reduced manual metadata entry time by 80% and saved over $220K annually. The federal team's OneStop work was recognized with a US Department of Commerce Bronze Medal in 2019.
At Xentity Corporation, I was the program manager for Colorado's first-in-nation Chief Data Office implementation at CDOT — the most complex engagement of my career. The scope was enormous: 20+ concurrent initiatives, 11 consultants across five workstreams, and a 3,000-person agency that had never had a CDO. My job was to translate executive vision into coordinated execution across teams building things that hadn't existed before — a real-time data hub processing 1.5B+ messages daily, a full GCP migration, a self-service data environment spanning APIs, dashboards, and cataloged assets across 20+ divisions, and an enterprise document management system that reduced contract processing time by 65% across 6,000+ documents. That last one was recognized as a year-end executive highlight presented to the Colorado Governor's office. The broader work earned recognition from Google as a leading GCP implementation, from FHWA as a reusable model toolkit for other state DOTs, from Esri with a Special Achievement in GIS Award, and from NASCIO with a 2021 State IT Recognition Award.
At HP Inc., I served as Program Manager for AI & Data Science Solutions — building the PMO function from the ground up inside a division operating across 30+ global markets. A central part of that work was delivering HP AI Studio, HP's first direct-to-consumer commercial software product, establishing entirely new delivery, support, and go-to-market models for subscription-based AI tools. I coordinated 100+ person cross-functional teams spanning engineering, product, commercial, and legal, defined the Solution Product Lifecycle adopted across the division, and helped grow the portfolio from $371M to $641M over my tenure.
The through-line isn't industry or domain. It's the nature of the work: ambiguous, high-stakes, first-of-kind. I've learned that this kind of work requires something different from standard program management — a tolerance for building the plane while flying it, an ability to create clarity for others when you don't have it yourself yet, and a genuine interest in the technical substance of what you're managing, not just the Gantt chart.
That last part matters to me. My MS in Information Sciences was built around a federally-funded Team Science curriculum — the discipline of organizing highly cross-functional teams to tackle singular, complex problems. That framework shaped how I approach every program I've led since. Combined with undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Biology and an MBA, it gives me an unusual range: I can sit with engineers and understand the constraints, then walk into the C-suite and translate them into business language. The translation work is where I'm most useful.
