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Small Team Management Portfolio
Roger Coulter
Making tools for passionate teams to succeed
Some people's passion is software, some get excited by hardware, or finance, or manufacturing, or energy, or doing good works. I like how small teams, and systems, and data can come together in hyper-effective organic machines. Finance (planning), accounting (measuring), human resources (finding an motivating a team), the data they collect, and the common processes they use to get work done are the grease of a virtuous cycle. Simply following the conventional wisdom, standard operating procedures, or a vanilla implementations is like substituting tar and for the grease and wondering why your engine runs slow. In the case studies and white papers below I share some examples of how I bring clarity, focus, and agility to small and medium organizations. I've used agile software concepts to organize a manufacturing floor, I've used manufacturing inventory algorithms to bring a key insight to a leasing operation, financial tools in non-profits, and economic analysis in human relations and in every case I've developed solutions that are right-sized, scalable to the next stage of development and directly relevant to the organization's overall strategy and needs.
Starting with the right tools
Organizations typically start with a generic set of accounts and they evolve ad hoc as needed. This paper shows why those systems grow increasingly opaque and lead to management discussions about "what's in a number?" rather than "What can be done to improve the numbers?"
Planning and building
Buy-in, and accountability starts with managers narratives of what they want to accomplish - the budgeting and forecasting process must start with that narrative.
Tools for steering
Employees generally hate performance reviews, but say they want more feedback. How to break the paradox and create a high-performing culture.
Putting it all together
A story about how I used agile computing concepts to build a proto-ERP system that gave a growing organization space to develop and most of the benefits of a full ERP.
Finding colleagues
General Biodiesel couldn't get it's new chemical plant to work right. The solution came from an unlikely source: we needed to think about who we were hiring.
Confronting obstacles
Congress enacted various programs to support biodiesel - the benefits went straight to big oil. Understanding policy, industry pricing, economics and unanticipated consequences of government programs.
Auxiliary power
Private Equity Financing and Banking
General biodiesel raised over $20M in debt and $20M in equity over 10 years and we built a trusted relationship with the ownership group. The company developed extensive banking relationships. (TBD)
How can we get that done?
Level Technology was a fintech making small merchant cash advances to people at the bottom of the income spectrum. They'd built a system to track current balances, but couldn't create a traditional ledger for their customers (or themselves).
Managing Resources
Optimizing Resources, Short and Long Term Solutions
What do General Biodiesel and Goldman Sachs have in common? They both thought they needed a storage solution to a vexing problem. And they were both wrong. General Biodiesel was was running out of a raw material almost every day, the two obvious solutions would take years to implement. Goldman Sachs was buying a parking lot to placate the mayor (and the public); what they need was 5 traffic cones.
The big picture
Seeing the Forest
The Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, a trade school teaching boatbuilding and marine systems thought they were on the verge of a crisis. In fact, a redesigned set of reporting and tools showed a remarkably vibrant organization proactively tackling a few manageable issues. (TBD)