About

Who is SD Consulting Services LLC?

Michael Reep, Ph.D. is the Principal and Owner (although I prefer to go by Mike).

What does the SD represent? (and why the ancient font logo?)

Servus Ducis – the Latin phrase for servant leadership and a driving aspect of Agile teams.

My Approaches

My philosophy as a technical project and program manager is to maintain a wide range of knowledge to provide the guidance, direction and support for all aspects of the software development, deployment, and operations processes. My team-focused approach recognizes and leverages the strengths and capabilities of the team members and subject matter experts.

I have found the guidance provided by Disciplined Agile (DA) to be extremely valuable and leverage this framework wherever possible. I completed the new PMI DA training to improve my ability to support teams with the DA Coaching approaches and client enterprise agile initiatives through the DA Value Stream Consultant program.

As a Federal Contractor, I diligently work to support my Government counterparts in fulfilling their responsibilities while developing and maintaining the systems to provide the desired business value.

As an Adjunct Professor, my Software Architectures undergraduate course focuses on providing students the foundations of current industry development techniques with the latest approaches including domain driven design, microservices, model-view and other patterns, agile development and cloud implementations. I also taught the first graduate-level Agile Development and DevOps course at GMU with a view towards helping students understanding not just what is done – but why.  

As a consultant, I look to bring all those experiences, training, education and technical knowledge into a holistic approach in furthering other Federal Government contractors on their Agile journey. My goal in every engagement is to complete the specific assignments while also helping to enable the organization and their staff to perform the tasks on their own.

My background

I moved to the Washington DC area right out of college for a software engineering position with a Federal Government consulting company – and that is where most of my time has been spent since then. I quickly moved up into a team lead role and eventually into technical project and program management where I was directly involved in solutions architecture and the entire system development lifecycle. After a stint as a Division Director, I returned to my roots and have been in positions providing agile coaching, project manager mentoring, enterprise infrastructure support advising, solutions architecture, team leadership for competitive procurements (orals, written and technical), and managing a software development effort at the Department of Homeland Security.

My LinkedIn Page provides additional information on my work history and selected projects.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mreep/

Technical Challenge Leadership and Coaching

Over the last couple of years, I have focused extensively on preparing development teams for procurements with oral presentations and interviews, code submissions and technical demonstrations. (The exact terms vary by RFP and agency.) This move away from extensive document submissions requires a whole different approach and engagement with technical staff. The RFP down-select process may have an initial screening based on past performance and/or written management/technical approaches followed by one or more of the following:

  • Orals: The most challenging version for orals is when a period of time is set aside with no specific questions provided in advance – just a list of potential topics and evaluation criteria. The team needs assistance in developing the answer frameworks, pre-staged graphics (that may need to be drawn free-hand on a white board), integrating win themes and team dynamics. Then sample questions are developed based on the evaluation criteria, RFP, SOW, agency agile approaches, and varying complexity. Multiple practice sessions help the team come together and develop a smooth flow. Each session has a new set of questions with a different theme to provide a wide exposure of potential situations. The feedback from my teams is that they have felt well-prepared and that the sample questions were close for most, if not all, of the event.
  • Code submissions: In this variation, the team is provided a business problem and supporting user stories with a set period (2-3 weeks) to deliver working solution. The process described below for technical demonstrations provides a solid approach to prepare the team for this intense period and validate readiness. On my first code submission effort, we made the down-select to the final stage.
  • Technical Demonstrations: This one-day effort requires the team to fully develop a working solution while demonstrating their agile process, development practices, a fully populated and implemented CI/CD deployment pipeline, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automatically set up the dev, test and production environments. Outside all the work required to prepare the IaC and CI/CD automated scripts, the team needs extensive preparation to successfully perform in this pressure-cooker.

    I developed the Performance Agile SM framework to address these engagements. I start with a highly structured, time-boxed action plan that demonstrates the typical agile processes with the focus on developing a working solution for the final presentation. The action plan is modified to highlight the prime’s capabilities, team member strengths, and the specific RFP/agency requirements. We then typically practice this repeatedly in 2 sessions of 3-4 hours each week followed by full-day practice sessions. These practices help the team work out the process and develop a firm understanding of how much they can (and can not) accomplish in one day. On a recent engagement, I coached a team that had started practicing into a high-performing team in three weeks for a win on their first technical demonstration attempt.

My Education

  • Ph.D. in Information Technology, George Mason University, 2018
  • Masters in Software Systems Engineering, George Mason University, 1997
  • Bachelors in Computer Science, Clarkson University, 1985
  • Associates in Liberal Arts, Paul Smith’s College, 1983

My Current Certifications

  • Project Management Professional, 2002
  • Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant, 2021 (test pending)
  • Disciplined Agile Coach, 2021 (test pending)
  • Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master, 2021
  • Disciplined Agile Scrum Master, 2021
  • PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner, 2012
  • Professional Scrum Master I, 2016
  • Certified SAFe Agilist, 2021
  • Solutions Architect – Associate (AWS), 2018
  • Systems Security Certified Practitioner, 2010
  • ITIL v3 Foundation, 2012
  • Certified Document Imaging Architech, 2000

My Contact

Reach out to me through a LinkedIn message or direct email to mreep@sdconsultingsvcs.com

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