Pace, Florida · Open to relocation · TS/SCI (inactive)
Senior Program Manager PMP PSM
I take programs with no structure and make them predictable. At Octave that is a $68M portfolio of public safety integrations, 42 customer programs from implementation through sustainment, and 38 developers and 4 managers across three countries. Fifteen-plus years of this, in places where a missed date has consequences.
What I solve
Three teams shipping with no release process. I built one, with the QA and CI/CD gates to catch defects before they reach a live agency environment.
Live production defects down 78%, retention up 40%, lost revenue down 35%, $280K saved in Q3 2026
I rebuilt the path from signed agreement to production, sequencing requirements, staffing, and environments in parallel instead of one after another.
On-time go-lives from 3 in 10 customers to 6 in 10, and signed agreement to development start from six months to 48 days
I led the organization through the Hexagon-to-Octave corporate separation. New entity, new systems, contracts and baselines carried across, customer programs mid-flight the entire time.
No delivery commitments lost
Simply Coding had no contracts and no capture process. I won the first $300K with a peer-led model that undercut instructor-led competitors, then negotiated terms with CoreCivic, GEO Group, MTC, DOJ, DOE, and Job Corps.
$100K to $6.6M ARR, through acquisition by Sim Ventures
How I work
Programs rarely fail in execution. They fail at intake, at the baseline, and in the gaps between teams where the dependency belongs to no one.
Intake
Requirements, staffing, environments, and customer-side prerequisites each get an owner and run in parallel, so a program starts when the conditions are met.
Baseline
Scope, schedule, and cost baselined against real capacity. If I cannot trace a date back to the people behind it, it is a forecast and I label it as one.
Risk and dependencies
Slippage happens in the gaps: a vendor, a customer prerequisite, a decision nobody owns. Those get a scored register, a named owner, and an escalation threshold.
Go-live
Acceptance criteria agreed before build, and a go or no-go I am willing to fail. Saying a thing is not ready is the decision that sets up the next program.
Sustainment
My programs run through long-term maintenance, so transition is planned: who owns it afterwards, what the support path is, what the customer was promised.
Governance
One version of the portfolio on a schedule leadership can rely on. I am also the customer's direct line, so nobody has to learn our org chart to get an answer.
Read the portfolio as it is, not as the status deck says. Meet the sponsors, the leads, and a real customer. Work out which dates are committed and which are hoped for.
One source of status, a scored risk and dependency register, an escalation path with named owners. You cannot re-baseline a schedule you cannot see.
Re-baseline what needs it, agree acceptance criteria on what is already in flight, and stand up the governance that keeps both honest.
What I do not do in the first month is reorganize anything. Most delivery problems present as process problems and turn out to be visibility problems. Reorganizing first spends the trust you need to do it properly later.
Track record
Octave (formerly Hexagon), OnCall Public Safety · Senior Program Manager and DevOps Manager
A $68M portfolio of law enforcement Records and Dispatch integration programs. 42 customer programs from implementation through sustainment, delivered by 38 developers and 4 managers across three countries. I own scope, schedule, cost, and risk, and I am the customer-facing contact on all of them.
Simply Coding
Brought in to run RFPs and capture for a company with neither contracts nor a capture process, then to carry what I won through delivery, across ten locations and 400+ students.
IQVIA · pharmaceutical commercial technology
Led 14 developers building call planning, CRM, training, and reporting tools inside IQVIA's OCE app for pharmaceutical sales reps. Pharma commercial work runs on three constraints at once, and a program that respects only two does not ship.
United States Navy · Lieutenant Commander · Navy Reserve 2020 to 2025
Fourteen years of program management in uniform alongside full flying duties. Broken down in the next section.
United States Army · Sergeant
Where I started. Enlisted crew chief on AH-64 Apaches. Airborne, Air Assault, and Pathfinder qualified.
Navy Reserve service from 2020 to 2025 ran alongside the civilian roles. Those five years are counted once, not twice.
Background
I flew the EP-3 as an electronic warfare Aircraft Commander and Mission Commander: 1,700+ hours, five deployments, a Combat Air Medal. The flying is the part people ask about. The program management underneath it is the part that transfers.
Senior PM, Operations, Education & Acquisition Training Air Wing Five · 2018 to 2020
Operations, education, and acquisition programs for a flight training wing. Trained roughly 100 student aviators and worked with NAVAIR at NAS Patuxent River on platform acquisition and test.
Senior PM, Maintenance & Operations VQ-1, Whidbey Island · 2014 to 2018
Maintenance and operations programs for ISR and electronic warfare missions, across five deployments as Aircraft Commander and Mission Commander.
Student Operations PM Naval Flight Training · 2011 to 2014
Moved 400+ students through the Navy flight school syllabus, cutting time to train from 13 months to 4 months.
What transfers is not the flying. It is the habit of running an honest readiness review: being the person willing to say a thing is not ready, with the evidence to back it, when saying so is expensive and unpopular.
Credentials
Contact
If any of the six above sounded like your quarter, that is the conversation I am good at. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right fit.
zachary@engineersmith.com 435.919.6623 LinkedIn Pace, Florida