Project Health Assessment

xix

About the Author

Paul S. Royer is a senior project management consultant with specialties in project planning,

external quality assurance and risk assessment, project recovery, and project management office

administration and development. He was certified as a PMI® Project Management Professional®

in 2001 and practices his trade in the Pacific Northwest.

Royer’s professional career in information technology began in 1965 as an engineering student

co-op trainee from UC Berkeley assigned to the Simulation Section of the Flight Research Center,

NASA, Edwards Air Force Base, California. From that beginning and after a stint as a military

policeman with the US Army, Paul continued in IT with 2 years at the Napa County Auditor-

Controller, completed his BA at UCB, and worked 26 years with Kaiser Permanente Medical Care

Program in Northern California, 10 years as a consultant at CIBER, 4 years leading his own firm

Proactive Risk Management, and since 2011 as the project management administrator for the

Washington State Health Benefit Exchange’s Project Management Office.

Royer earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he

has also taught logical data modeling, relational database design, and structured analysis. He has also

taught numerous project management classes while with Kaiser and CIBER and at the Community

College of Bellevue, Washington. In addition, he is a published author of “Risk Management: e

Undiscovered Dimension of Project Management” (2000, PMI Project Management Journal, 31

(1), March) and Project Risk Management: A Proactive Approach (2002, Vienna, VA: Management

Concepts). He has also delivered the following presentations on various aspects of risk manage-

ment: How Healthy Is Your Project? (PMI Connections 2000 Proceedings, September 2000), How

Healthy Is Your Program? (PMI New Jersey Chapter Annual Symposium, May 2001), and Risk

Management and the “Small” Project (PMI Puget Sound Chapter, September 2002).

Royer began as a programmer trainee taking on ever-increasing management responsibility

covering diverse specialties within IT for 20 years, finally transitioning into the field of project/

program management in the late 1980s. Since 1997, Royer has provided more than 30 project

quality assurance and risk assessments to public agencies in Oregon, Washington, California,

and Missouri. e process improvement from these assessments increased project success rates;

although in a few cases, the best result was to help the sponsor shut down the project and mini-

mize loss. is assessment experience was key to developing the project health assessment tech-

niques described in this book.