"It is, after all, all about delivery."

Chuck Walrad
Founder

Although she started out as an applications programmer many years ago, Chuck has since served at Director and Executive levels in several successful software companies. She has managed the development and delivery of dozens of commercial software products, from relational database management systems, natural language translation systems, and educational courseware, to document processing systems. In each software organization, she saw that she had been recruited to solve similar sets of problems - problems that were recurringly the greatest impediments to effective software development. Accordingly, in 1987, she formed Davenport Consulting - a new type of consultancy designed to aid the software development community and take the pain out of software development and delivery. Davenport Consulting's approach contains three fundamental concepts:

• Establishing organizational infrastructures that serve project teams, rather than impeding their efforts.
• Understanding and using industry benchmarks, standards and best practices in the software disciplines.
• Attaining the complementary inter-group coordination that is needed for effective software development and delivery.

  In short, she launched Davenport with a single goal -- to make life saner.
  
  

Chuck is active in defining standards that are useful and usable for the software industry.

As a member of PMI, she was a team lead in the definition of the new standard for Organizational Project Management Maturity. As a team lead, Chuck was instrumental in revising the IEEE standard for defining software life cycle processes to assure that the standard is usable with Agile, iterative and incremental methods and methodologies. She is currently a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the Exeutive Committee for Software and Systems Engineering Standards.

Chuck's articles, talks and panel appearances show the breadth and depth of her experience in the software world. Examples include:

• "The Importance of Branching Models in SCM Models" IEEE Computer, September 2002.
• "Measurement: The Key to Application Development Quality", IBM Systems Journal, 1993.
• Invited speaker at United States National Academy of Sciences, DoD, Department of Commerce, CIA, and various industry conferences.
• Most recent conference paper is "Setting and Using Defect Find/Fix Goals".

She was also one of three major contributors to a textbook still used in the University of California system.

In addition, Chuck is recognized for her achievements by Marquis Who's Who in the West, Marquis Who's Who in Science & Engineering, The International Who's Who in Information and Technology, Who's Who in Colleges and Universities, Who's Who of American Women and Mensa.