"An expert is usually someone who learned from the experience of making mistakes the first time around."
- unknown

Biography – Beth Layman, Partner

Beth Layman is a successful process improvement consultant, facilitator, instructor, and coach with over 25 years of experience in the high tech sector. She is a recognized authority on measurement, a published author, and a popular speaker. Her experience encompasses a wide range of commercial, government, aerospace, and product software organizations. Beth has a track record of providing high value consulting services yielding tangible results to satisfied clients. She has worked both independently and with the Quality Assurance Institute, TeraQuest Metrics, Inc., McCabe and Associates, Software Quality Engineering, and other consulting firms to provide training and interactive workshops, assessments, management consulting, and coaching in process definition, management, and improvement, software and performance measurement, project and portfolio management, software quality assurance, and other software engineering methods. Beth's consulting credentials are supported by time spent in industry as an individual contributor, change agent and senior executive. Early in her career, she worked for software product and IT organizations as a programmer, analyst, project coordinator, and quality assurance manager. She was COO of TeraQuest and helped manage the acquisition and successful integration of the company. Recently, she worked inside Borland Software and McAfee Software to establish worldwide employee development, software and business process improvement, and enterprise-level portfolio management programs and project management offices. Beth is an SEI Authorized ®CMMI Lead Appraiser and is co-author of Practical Software Measurement: Objective Information for Decision Makers. 

Biography – John Layman, Partner

John Layman has an extensive record of success in all aspects of software development.  In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has gained broad experience of project, product, and service management, both as a practitioner and consultant.  With an emphasis on software as product, he is an authority on software engineering methods and quality assurance.  His background encompasses real-time and systems software, as well as applications in telephony, banking, insurance, distribution, manufacturing, health‑care and other industries.

Representative positions and engagements: 

  • Managed development of real-time software for the pioneering QUBE interactive cable television and security system.
  • Managed development of TravelMatch, a travel information product for AAA’s regional auto clubs.  Features included electronic booking of reservations and automated trip routing and mapping.
  • Headed software development for the microcomputer-based product line from Diacon Systems.  This included I/O firmware, operating systems, compilers/interpreters and software tools, file and database management systems, hardware diagnostics, and application packages for medical and dental practice management.
  • Software architect of the custom network management system used in the State of Florida’s private voice/data network, which handles more than 80,000 phones and 5 million calls per month.
  • Software architect of The Travelers agency management product for independent insurance agencies.
  • Led design and development of an interpretive Data Definition Language used to interface real-time lottery gaming systems to back-end payout systems.
  • Design consultant on a proprietary, high-availability database management system for the Online Computer Library Center, an early utilization of message-based architecture.

John has developed courseware and taught seminars on subjects such as peer reviews and defining and validating requirements.  He has lectured on a variety of software engineering topics, has contributed to print publications such as Windows Tech Journal, and moderated the Quality Assurance section of the Software Engineering Forum on CompuServe. 

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We have extensive experience applying industry models, frameworks, and standards in a broad range of business contexts. Our background includes Malcolm Baldrige, TQM, CMMI, Six Sigma, PMBOK, ISO, ITIL, and others.  However, we do not advocate cookbook approaches or slavish adherence to any model.  In the real world, models make good servants, but poor masters.  Cautious pragmatism is called for in applying elements of industry models or frameworks to actual practice.

Our professional affiliations include the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, and the Society of Women Engineers.