Stuart is a program manager and IT professional with 25 years of experience, with specialized expertise in Smart Grid technologies, managing complex technical projects, including system architecture design, software development and implementation, real-time data acquisition, Program Management Offices (PMOs), and Smart Grid technology efforts. He is known for innovative and out-of-the-box uses of current technology. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) from the Project Management Institute (PMI).
Stuart is an expert in web-based collaborative technologies, including SharePoint. He has managed remote virtual teams utilizing collaboration technologies for ten years and designed and managed these systems for internal use and customer-funded engagements. He is currently writing a book titled “Using Technology to Manage Projects: Increasing Project Manager Bandwidth.”
ENERNEX PROJECTS:
NIST Smart Grid Panel and Standards Development - In August of 2009, EnerNex was awarded the $8.6 million, two-year contract to help NIST sustain the accelerated development of the hundreds of compatible standards that will be required to build a secure, interoperable smart electric power grid. Stuart is the Program Manager for this effort, leading the EnerNex team and the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel’s (SGIP) Program Management Office (PMO). The EnerNex team is responsible for assisting NIST in its role under the Energy Information and Security Act (EISA) of 2007’s mandate to “coordinate the development of a framework that includes protocols and model standards for information management to achieve interoperability of smart grid devices and systems.” The contract value was increased to $10M in 2010 when the second option was exercised and the scope of work increased to support 18 standards Priority Action Plans (PAPs), Smart Grid testing and certification, architecture, cyber security, and expand the effort internationally. EnerNex is working with NIST, the private sector, and non-profit organizations to continue to advance a testing and certification infrastructure that ensures Smart Grid-related software, hardware and services conform to standards and interoperate.
NIST Phase I Smart Grid Interoperability Roadmap - Stuart led the EnerNex team as the primary subcontractor in supporting EPRI with stakeholder assessments, roadmap development, workshop facilitation, priority action plans, use case identification and extension, and the development of the Smart Grid conceptual model.
California Energy Commission: Statewide demand response deployment - Stuart is the project manager and the principal investigator in developing the requirements and reference architecture for the California Demand Response Analysis and Control System (DRACS). His emphasis is his access to stakeholders and information exchange.
West Virginia Smart Grid Strategy - Stuart invented and developed the Modern Grid Maturity Model and self-scoring survey application which performs As-Is and Future State assessments of a utility’s Smart Grid maturity level.
PREVIOUS PROFESSIONAL HIGHLIGHTS:
Prior to joining EnerNex, Stuart was a Managing Consultant at SAIC for nearly nine years. As part of the leadership team, he provided project management support for large IT-related projects across multiple vertical industries. He was SAIC’s Collaborative Business Solutions Division Manager and performed business development, led division strategy, and managed programs, projects, and personnel for commercial and government efforts. He managed as many as 50 people in distributed virtual teams.
He supported utility industry initiatives around Predictive Analytics, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Modern/Smart Grid initiatives, and Utility of the Future (UoF) pilot programs. He led SAIC’s AMI Community of Practice and had articles published on that subject. Stuart led an SAIC Research and Development (R&D) project for real time data management, advanced predictive analytics, and knowledge management. He supported the National Energy Technology Laboratory‘s Modern Grid Initiative as manager and chief architect for simulation.
Other projects while at SAIC include:
The Modern Grid Initiative was a DOE-funded program to identify principles for creating a more efficient grid. Stuart worked as a technical lead, providing technology and simulation expertise for the project. The project developed the “7 Principle Characteristics” of the modern grid, which later became named “the Smart Grid”. This project was one of the foundational efforts for the Smart Grid, and its principle characteristics are still the underlying metrics for determining efficacy of Smart Grid products, systems, and policies.
The $2.4M Pfizer Therapeutic Area Realignment project to consolidate people, drug projects, and equipment to centralized R&D locations across the world. Stuart also managed four project managers at four sites, providing standard processes and methodologies for ensuring special care for Pfizer scientists and research projects. Another project that Stuart managed was an extended hybrid onshore/offshore team of more than 25 people across the different sites. He served as project manager for the largest SAIC-managed project for Pfizer’s M&A integration with Pharmacia. This work required a high level of coordination with a variety of stakeholders and a systematic process for ensuring that no data was overlooked and that data without specific value was destroyed. The project migrated two terabytes of data and archived the data from 11 worldwide sites. He managed 43 people across nine time zones from Milan, Italy, to San Francisco, California. In a 17-month period, more than ten million files were tagged with common metadata, migrated, and archived to a Connecticut facility. Stuart also served as Information Life-Cycle Management (ILM) manager for the Program Management Office (PMO).
Several projects for a single customer under the Oil Field Data Acquisition Program. The oil field company’s revenues have increased twenty-fold (to over $20M) since outsourcing the development to SAIC. The largest project to date involved the architecture and development of a distributed data acquisition system for offshore oil rigs. This innovative system uses Web services to pass requests and information from offshore to onshore and provides a remote maintenance utility for bug repair and upgrades on the offshore systems. This system allows offshore data to be sent to an onshore Web server at one-second intervals and reported to onshore personnel through .NET Web objects. The system is extensible, scalable, and has the ability to be personalized. The project was completed on time and finished ten percent under budget.
The NASA Advanced Technology Investment Assessment Management (ATIMS) Program, responsible for the integration of Microsoft Office Excel with custom development tools. The system was architected to allow multiple vendors to use standard Excel templates, which modeled their technology solution. These Excel files were then exercised through an application architected and developed by SAIC that determined which technologies had the highest ROI for the various programs. Some of these cutting edge technologies required funding 10 to 20 years in advance. This program—$13 million over three years—assisted NASA in determining how to prioritize its yearly $250 million budget for technology investment.
The Halliburton Vendor B2B Portal. He managed the development of Active Server Page (ASP) collaborative B2B solutions for Halliburton Energy Services. The system was developed to provide Halliburton project managers and procurement personnel a system for automating communication with vendors. The system included a collaborative environment with 2-D drawing markup and threaded discussions utilizing SiteScape, an integrated solution with SAP, biweekly personalized emails to all vendors, and an online tool for communicating on each procurement line item.
Prior to SAIC, Stuart was the Vice President/Owner of Global Majic Software. He developed commercial and customized software components (ActiveX and VBX) for use by Windows software developers in their applications. His responsibilities included director of marketing, sales, tech support, customer relations, contracts, software development and administrative duties.
Stuart was also a Senior Engineer/Software Developer for both Amtec Corporation and CAS, Inc. where he developed applications for U.S. Army contracts in simulation, data acquisition, and data analysis.