Meet Our Coach

Bob Maksimchuk is the founder and Principal Consultant of Project Pragmatics, LLC. He focuses on bringing software development best practices and process improvement to companies, large and small, in many industries.

Bob does this by bringing practical, pragmatic techniques to achieve his clients’ goals. Instead of a “rip and replace” mentality, Bob is highly experienced in delivering solutions that are tailored for each client’s unique development environment and then fine-tuned to how their teams actually work. His approach eases adoption of new practices and helps clients reap the benefits more quickly.

Key Skills:

Innovative Problem Solver

· Bob is an accomplished IT practitioner who thrives on implementing creative solutions to solve complex business / system development problems. Such creativity is often sparked from different and sometimes orthogonal perspectives to the problem at hand. As Albert Einstein said “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Bob’s broad experience across many industries coupled with deep development expertise enables him to adapt techniques and solutions from various fields to help simplify and resolve problems in systems and software development.

Full Software Development Lifecycle / Product Development Practitioner

· Bob has full lifecycle experience on large, complex systems development programs, ranging from initial Envisioning and Strategic Planning through Deployment and Maintenance. He has served in most technical and management roles, performing:

o opportunity identification market and competitive analysis strategic solution definition

o feasibility studies business case development risk management

o business systems analysis requirements elicitation and analysis architecture

o system and process modeling analysis and design software development

o testing software maintenance product packaging

o product / project management product branding, positioning, and marketing customer liaison

Software Systems Modeling and Analysis Expertise

· Bob is a thought leader in the system / software modeling and process fields having written and co-authored numerous books and articles.

· As Senior UML Evangelist (i.e., subject matter expert and external spokesperson) for IBM / Rational, he traveled worldwide working with clients and as a featured speaker in numerous technology conferences, workshops, and seminars on UML, object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), and related technology topics.

Excellent Communicator

· As a Dale Carnegie graduate and four-time award winner, Bob understands the importance of effective communication, particularly in the complex and often abstract field of software development. Even the best ideas can't be used effectively if they can't be communicated effectively.

· Along with his Evangelist speaking engagements mentioned above, Bob later served as corporate spokesperson for Unisys, implementing a communications program that advanced the visibility and position of Unisys’ technology in the marketplace. He regularly briefed industry analysts, press, clients, and strategic partners.

· In addition, he served as Liaison to numerous government agencies on large development programs.

Practical, Pragmatic, and People-Centric

· Many software development best practices may be beneficial, but of what use are they if your team doesn’t fully understand how they should be properly applied? Development processes may be complete and all-encompassing, but what good are they if your team cannot execute according to their direction? And what about the traps and pitfalls that come along with unintentionally misusing such techniques? Do you have the time and the resources to make those mistakes or would it be better to learn from those that have walked that path before you?

This is often the situation teams find themselves in when trying “out-of-the-box” development techniques. Such techniques must be made practical; they must be made pragmatic (not just theoretical), and they must be made people-centric, tailored to your specific team’s way of working. These are the three key principles that are woven into everything Bob does with his clients.

Notable Accomplishments:

·    Led agile engagements and managed agile adoption teams, providing coaching, training, and consulting for over 60 teams, helping them adopt agile practices and customizing their development processes to smooth the transition from waterfall processes to agile / Scrum / hybrid approaches.

·    Enabled a client to meet 36 critical customer milestones on a very compressed schedule (20 weeks) and to expand their product line by introducing agile modeling practices, creating a unique product line variability practice, and establishing a lightweight change management process.

·    Transformed a client’s development staff from being compartmented and inflexible to one that was collaborative and responsive to their customer’s needs, by customizing a full-lifecycle development process, blending their existing Rational Unified Process (RUP) implementation with agile practices.

·    Received a General Manager’s Award for remediating a troubled system-of-systems development project. The project was behind schedule and the design would not meet the customer’s technical requirements. Once assigned as the responsible Systems Engineer, I drove the validation of the existing requirements baseline, performed design assessments, and initiated changes that enabled the project to deliver successfully and meet the needs of both the customer and the other systems participating in the enterprise.

·    Provided IBM / Rational a $1-2 billion market opportunity, by designing their first strategic solution offering in the Product Lifecycle Management market.

·    In less than two years, built a consulting organization and grew consulting services revenue 600%, driving a startup company to a multi-million dollar level of revenue, for the first time.

Subpages (2): Publications Recommendations