Services
StudioBE consulting helps leaders of public and private organizations that run a lot of IT projects at once connect strategy to delivery. It works at two levels: agile coaching for delivery teams, and portfolio management with PPM4Agile and its four practices, Align, Focus, Deliver, and Learn. Consulting usually starts with a paid 60-minute Clarity Session, and every engagement is scoped to the challenges you need to solve.
Where to start
Two ways in: Eric puts the operating system in place with your staff, or your people learn it through the self-paced course. Consulting starts with a 60-minute Clarity Session, which ends with what fits next: an engagement, the course, or both. They are not mutually exclusive.
Eric puts PPM4Agile in place with your staff, at the team level, the portfolio level, or both. The outputs are agreed before the work starts.
Step one: the 60-minute Clarity Session
Learn the framework at your own pace by building a playbook for your own organization.
Two levels of consulting
The teams that deliver the work, and the portfolio that decides what they work on. Some clients need one, many need both, and both run on the same end-to-end framework.
For delivery teams that want to get better at agile, or start. Eric works on how the team is built, how it runs its ceremonies, and how it tracks and reports its work. That includes agile transformation: moving from waterfall, or doing agile better after years of trying.
For leaders who need the whole pipeline to work, not one part of it. Project portfolio management connects everything from your goals and objectives, to choosing the projects that serve them, to planning, execution, production, and measuring whether you got the value you paid for.
Eric leads every engagement. He coaches a few teams himself. For programs with many teams, he brings in coaches and trains them on the same framework, and he can help you interview contractors and decide what each team needs. Everyone works from one framework and one connected set of tools, not as cowboys doing it their own way.
How an engagement runs
Four steps, in order. What each one produces is agreed when the engagement is scoped.
A 60-minute evaluation built on a structured set of questions and a conversation about your portfolio. You leave knowing what Eric thinks is going on and what fits next.
We look at the actual list of initiatives, the capacity behind them, and the governance around them, and write down what the operating system is doing today.
Eric starts where the review points and puts Align, Focus, Deliver, and Learn in place with your staff. Your leaders make the decisions, and your people learn to run it themselves.
Metrics go on dashboards your leaders know how to act on, and your PMO or portfolio lead owns the cadence before we step back.
StudioBE works with leaders of public and private organizations that run a lot of IT projects at once. Industry isn’t what decides fit. Eric has worked in financial services, healthcare, online retail, technology, and government, and what those organizations shared was a pipeline of projects that had to be coordinated. The buyer is usually a VP who owns a portfolio, holds the budget, and can see the work end to end. Day to day, the work is with PMO directors, delivery and test managers, and organizational change management (OCM) leads. The usual signal is a disconnect: the business says IT is late, IT says the business keeps changing its mind, and scope, schedule, and budget all keep slipping. Many of these organizations already run Scrum or SAFe and have bought the tools. You don’t need a big program to start, but you do need one end-to-end framework that everyone works from. That is what PPM4Agile provides, and a 60-minute Clarity Session is the place to start.
Course and consulting
They aren’t either-or. The PPM4Agile course and consulting teach the same framework, and they work well together. The Clarity Session is where Eric helps you choose.
Eric consults with your organization while the people in key roles take the course, so they get the end-to-end view and can put what they learn in place alongside him.
Your people take the course and build their playbook. Then you can bring Eric in for a consulting engagement, scoped separately from the course, to look at it, give his read, and help you implement it.
The course was designed as standalone, self-directed training with tangible outputs for where you work. Consulting stands on its own too, and either one can get you to the same end result.
When the people who took it don’t have the authority to change things. Say the people who own and configure the tools are not the people who use them. The users know what they need, and the owners say no. Knowing what to do doesn’t help if you can’t get it done, so it matters who you send and what authority they have.
When some people need the whole picture. Eric suggests the course for people in key roles, the ones who need the authority to make changes and bring people together, because it gives them the end-to-end view of the framework. Others get coaching focused on their own role: what should come in to them, and what they hand to the next group.
No. PPM4Agile is framework-neutral. It runs end to end alongside team-level practice, so it works whether your teams run Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, or a traditional stage-gate process. What it needs is a leadership group willing to rank work and hold the ranking. If your teams want to move from waterfall, or do agile better, team-level coaching is part of the consulting too.
Often the training and the certifications aren’t the problem. Those programs teach accurate material. Implementation is the problem. Tools that aren’t configured for the people using them, or aren’t integrated with the rest of your pipeline, leave gaps between groups, and work falls into them. Buying the tool was never the solution on its own either. If you have done agile for years and still see the symptoms above, that gap is where to look.
Eric worked at one of the biggest for more than seven years and there is a lot of talent there, so this is not a knock on them. But a large firm can arrive like an army, put up a tent on your campus, and that gets disruptive and expensive. Eric leads every engagement himself and the work is more tailored: scoped to the challenges in front of you. For programs with many teams he brings in coaches and trains them on the same framework, so nobody shows up doing it their own way, and the goal is for your own people to get good at getting better and own the cadence as early as possible.
No. Engagements are scoped, not billed by the hour or as time and materials. We agree on the challenges to address and the outputs you get, and the fee covers that. Travel for on-site visits is billed separately, at cost, because how often and how long isn’t known until the work is under way.
Sometimes. Most of the work happens over Zoom, and this kind of work goes well that way. Eric comes on site when it helps, for example at the start, the middle, or the end of an engagement, and when the right people can be in the room. On-site work is available anywhere in the US; outside the US the work is remote. There’s plenty of overlap across US time zones for working sessions.
Probably. A team of five still needs to prioritize, and it still has a pipeline, from a funded idea to something live customers can give feedback on. A portfolio-level PPM4Agile rollout fits mid-size organizations and up, because it assumes lots of projects and teams in flight at once.
Either way the order is the same. Think of a house with several stories. You get the ground floor stable first, meaning the end-to-end pipeline, before you add more stories: more teams, more projects, or other departments like marketing and HR. Scale too far, too fast, and you get chaos at a larger scale.
Both. They share the same ground floor but face different problems. A startup needs to be clear about what it’s doing so it can build the first thing, get feedback, and pivot. Facebook looks nothing like it did when it was small, and it got there by pivoting on feedback. A large organization has more departments, more silos, and more people with their own budgets who want to do it their way, so the work is getting everyone onto one framework.
Organizations that are open to change, whatever their size. If what you’re doing already works, you don’t need outside help. One warning: the VP often sees the need before the managers closer to the work do. The VP says go fix this, and the managers say they don’t need fixing. It goes much better when both come to the table willing to try something different.
Yes. Eric has worked with California state departments, including the California Department of Public Health, first at Deloitte and later through StudioBE, where the work came through a staffing agency. Constraints like procurement and oversight are treated as inputs to the Align practice, not as reasons the approach cannot apply. See the public-sector page for how that works.
If collaboration, coordination, and timely delivery are already hurting, the harder question is whether you have the budget to fail. That should never be an option. So what you are really deciding is whether you can afford not to be successful, and that usually changes how the budget conversation goes.
$197 for the hour. The Portfolio Clarity Session can be extended if you need more time. It’s a small commitment compared with an engagement, and a good place to start.
Start here
60-Minute Portfolio Clarity Session
One paid conversation over Zoom about your portfolio and your constraints. You leave knowing what Eric thinks is going on and what fits next.
What you get
