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StudioBE

Principal, StudioBE

B. Eric Fullerton

B. Eric Fullerton is the creator of PPM4Agile and the principal of StudioBE. He works with leaders of public and private organizations that run a lot of IT projects at once, helping them connect strategy to delivery. He has been doing this kind of work for more than 20 years, and he leads every engagement himself.

About StudioBE

Background

What is Eric Fullerton’s background?

Eric Fullerton has more than 20 years in project, program, and portfolio management, with public and private organizations in financial services, healthcare, online retail, technology, and government. His work runs at two levels: coaching delivery teams on how they are built, how they run their ceremonies, and how they track and report, and connecting the portfolio above them, where leadership decisions about intake, funding, and cadence either connect strategy to delivery or quietly disconnect them.

PPM4Agile grew out of that work. Over the years he kept seeing organizations with the training and the tools but no view of how the whole framework connected. At Centene he built a lightweight framework called Concept to Customer, and he has since refined it into a portfolio operating system in four phases, from portfolio development through planning and execution to evaluation, value, and learning, that can be applied inside existing governance rather than replacing it. The phases tie back to three decisions every portfolio makes: what to invest in, what is in scope and what isn’t, and whether the work delivered the value it promised.

He founded StudioBE to bring that system to organizations directly. Engagements range from a single Portfolio Clarity Session to staged implementations across a full portfolio, and he leads every one. You work with him, not with junior staff who need guidance of their own. He coaches a few teams himself, and when a program needs coaching across many teams he brings in coaches and trains them on the same framework, or helps you interview, hire, and train your own. Most of the work happens over Zoom, and he comes on site when it helps, sometimes at the start, the middle, or the end.

Career

How did he get here?

His resume covers the last ten years by design. The earlier steps are here because that is where the pattern recognition came from, and pattern recognition is what he brings to a portfolio.

  1. The service industry

    Before IT, Eric worked in the service industry in a number of capacities. That is where he learned to collaborate: listening to people, understanding their pain points, and seeing the work from their side. He still treats that as the start of everything that makes an organization work.

  2. AT&T, mainframe data center

    His first IT role serviced the back end of the company, the billing cycle and customer data management. When something broke, the control center had to spot it fast, get to the root cause, and pull the right people together, because an outage cost money by the minute. It was a close look at how hardware, applications, network, data, security, people, and process all connect.

  3. AT&T, monitoring and diagnostics

    He moved to a group writing programs and shell scripts that monitored systems, identified problems, and gave other teams insight they did not have before. Technical diagnosis and collaboration in the same job: find out what is really going on, then build the thing that makes someone else’s work easier.

  4. Project management, then programs

    From single projects into multiple projects and programs, where the question stops being how one piece of work gets delivered and starts being how a lot of work gets coordinated.

  5. LPL, the first portfolio view

    At LPL he learned what it takes to go from managing one project well to being organized across many of them at once. That is where frameworks and systems started to matter, because you are no longer watching the mechanics of a single delivery.

  6. Deloitte, implementation manager for more than seven years

    On the ground with clients, public and private, across industries: understanding their problems, solving them, and teaching those clients to find their own. He also trained Deloitte’s own staff and other engagement teams on implementing portfolio management and agile. The same gap kept turning up: organizations could not see the framework end to end.

  7. Centene, senior agile coach

    A full-time coaching role in one division of a healthcare organization that was trying to use SAFe, working alongside an enterprise PMO that was a precursor to a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence. He coached Scrum practice, set goals the division’s work could be traced to, built backlogs for the teams and for senior leadership, trained vice presidents, configured Jira for metrics and governance, put metrics on dashboards and taught leaders to act on them, helped hire and onboard staff, and was sent into teams that were struggling with their business partners. What the organization did not have was one framework everyone worked from, so he built a lightweight one called concept to customer: from the idea to the customer, with the workflow, roles, meetings, tools, and artifacts laid out so each area can see how its outputs become the next area’s inputs. People started working more as one group and could see the bottlenecks and idle time. That is what became PPM4Agile, and Centene later brought him back through StudioBE.

  8. StudioBE

    He founded StudioBE to have more say in what he implemented, how he implemented it, and with whom. The PPM4Agile course followed, so the same approach could reach organizations that will never sit in a one-on-one engagement with him.

Certifications

What is he certified in?

  • PMP, Project Management Professional

    Project Management Institute

  • CSM, Certified ScrumMaster

    Scrum Alliance

  • CSPO, Certified Scrum Product Owner

    Scrum Alliance

  • ICP-ACC, Agile Coaching

    ICAgile

  • ICP-ATF, Agile Team Facilitation

    ICAgile

  • SPC, SAFe Practice Consultant

    Scaled Agile

Education

Where did he study?

  • BS, International Business

    Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

  • MS, Software Engineering

    National University

Being certified is the starting point, not the ending point. As a SAFe Practice Consultant, he can deliver and certify inside SAFe, and what he has seen there is that organizations struggle to implement a large framework well, whether it comes from Scaled Agile or PMI.

Expertise

What are his areas of expertise?

  • Team-level agile coaching and agile transformation

  • Agile portfolio management and lean portfolio management

  • PMO design and portfolio governance

  • Capacity validation, release planning, and WIP limits at the portfolio level

  • Flow metrics and outcome measurement

  • Public-sector portfolio work, including programs that rely on contractors

  • Training and coaching executives on portfolio decisions

Teaching

Where has he taught?

  • The self-paced PPM4Agile course, which he created

  • Deloitte staff and other engagement teams, on implementing portfolio management and agile

  • Vice presidents and delivery teams at Centene, on agile and running a framework

  • Posts on LinkedIn

What is he like to work with?

Asked how clients would describe the work, Eric answers in three parts. The first is knowledge and experience. The certifications are there, but what shows up in the room is having seen this before: across many industries, large and small, public and private, he has built enough pattern and symptom recognition to name where a cause sits before the client does. The second is that he is approachable. He listens, he collaborates, and he teaches, which is not how every expert is wired. The third is that he can be tough. His analogy is a coach: one who sits passively on the sideline and doesn’t get excited about results is not a good coach. What gets him going is collaboration and synergy, one plus one making three, and he has no need to be the center of attention while it happens.

What does Eric Fullerton do?

Eric Fullerton helps organizations run their portfolios as one connected system rather than a collection of projects. He works at two levels. With delivery teams, he coaches how teams are built, how they run their ceremonies, and how they track and report, including moves from waterfall to agile. At the portfolio level, he works with VPs, PMO directors, and delivery leads to make three decisions explicit: the investment decision (what to fund and what not to), the scope decision (what to do, what to say no to, and when to pivot), and the value decision (whether the work delivered what it promised). PPM4Agile, which he created, works those three decisions through four phases: portfolio development, planning, execution, and evaluation, value, and learning. His career spans public and private organizations, from financial services and healthcare to technology and government. He also built a self-paced course that teaches the system. The aim is an organization that gets good at getting better.

Connect

How can you get in touch?

The usual first step is a paid 60-minute Clarity Session. For anything else, email or LinkedIn works.

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