Consulting & Training
I solve the problems that sit between business and technology — four decades building enterprise systems and teaching the people who run them, now in service of your organization.
What I take on #
Hands-on help from a practitioner who has done it — not a deck from the sidelines.
- Enterprise systems, from business case to adoption — CRM, eCommerce, research-administration portals, and other institutional platforms: vendor selection, funding, implementation, change management, training, and support models
- Business analysis & product management — requirements and use cases, product roadmaps and prioritization, and translating between business and engineering so what ships is what the business needs
- Marketing automation & segmentation — audience strategy, personalization, and campaign automation on any platform — Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and more
- AI adoption that pays — practical workflows, usage-cost governance, guardrails for unapproved AI tools, and the manager enablement that makes AI stick
- Program design — experiential learning and university–industry programs, modeled on UCLA’s Epicenter
- Customer experience reviews — field-tested CX audits of your digital touchpoints (see my CX field notes)
Proof, not promises #
- Enterprise CRM
$3M Salesforce CRM, 700,000 records
UCLA Alumni Affairs’ alumni-data-enhancement CRM — led from business case and funding through implementation, with marketing automation and the support model to sustain it.
- Digital transformation
Research administration, paper to platform
Two campus-wide research-administration systems (eDGE & SafetyNet) serving 3,000 UCLA researchers — eDGE delivered in 18 weeks, a UC first.
- eCommerce turnaround
60% to 99% uptime, $15M to $50M
As VP of eCommerce at CyberDefender: platform rebuilt end to end, PCI compliance from scratch, and a move from OTC to NASDAQ.
How I see the details others miss: my CX Field Notes — field-tested reviews of real customer experiences, each ending in a principle.
Professional Development Training #
Workshops, bootcamps, and courses designed for your team or institution, delivered live or virtually — taught with Harvard Business Impact case studies and simulations (licensed separately per participant). Topics I teach:
- Project Management — planning, budgeting, risk, and delivery, grounded in PMI practice
- Design Thinking — the design-sprint framework behind my UCLA Innovation Challenges
- Lean Startup & Agile — build–measure–learn, MVPs, and iterative delivery
- Systems Thinking — feedback loops and root causes, so teams fix systems instead of symptoms
- AI Adoption — hands-on generative AI for real work, from prompts to governed workflows
- Building Scalable Tech — architecture and platform choices that survive growth
- How to Pitch — structuring and delivering the pitch that wins buy-in, from executives to investors
- Visual Leadership — communicating strategy visually so teams align faster
- Project-Based & Experiential Learning — programs where teams learn by shipping real projects, modeled on Epicenter
- Train-the-Trainer — adult-learning principles that turn your experts into instructors
The flagship format is the Design Thinking Innovation Challenge — the project-based program I founded at UCLA in 2018, built on the Google Ventures design-thinking framework. It became a 4-unit UCLA Engineering course, and I have run it from UCLA to Los Angeles City College (with LA County and JPL) to the American University of Kurdistan — where it grew from 3 teams to 6, applications quadrupled, and Impact Hub Duhok was born out of the program. In 2024, the EU-funded SKYE Net project with World Vision Armenia brought the same approach to social entrepreneurs through IRIS Business Incubator.
Ready to talk?
A first consulting session is a working session — bring the problem, leave with a direction. For training and larger engagements, let’s scope it together.