Ken Kolchier is a member of Arthur D. Little's AMP open consulting network. He is experienced in all aspects of software development both as a technical discipline, and as a business. In his almost 2-decade career, Ken has brought excellence to bear in hands-on development, architectural strategies and assessments, engineering business management, Agile coaching and transformation, as well as building people, processes, and teams to their fullest potential.

Ken’s approach to all facets of software excellence is based heavily on Agile philosophy, honing in quickly on what works regardless of the current state of people or technology. His deepest experience is in multi-system integrations and high data flows, utilizing all manner of technical implementations — from RESTful API connections, to traditional Enterprise Service Bus interactions, and everything in-between. Ken’s engagements have ranged from leading small single-team startups towards stability and maturity, to 300-person IT innovation initiatives reinventing the entire way business is done. 

At Tiger Pistol, Ken served as VP of Software Engineering, restructuring, enhancing, and coaching an engineering team, instituting best practices such as code-coverage gates, sprint-tracking process, test-focus, and single-work-in-progress orientation. At uShip, where he also served as VP of Software Engineering, Ken worked as a hands-on leader, often embedded with Agile teams as lead developer, architect, and coach. He directly managed an Engineering Organization (Development, Agile, QA, Architecture, DevOps, IT and Data Departments) that grew to 70 people and 10 Agile teams. As VP of Software Development at mobi, Ken helped to rejuvenate the development team, both capacity and morale.

Prior to these positions, Ken served as Solution Architect at Xynx Health, leading a strategic and tactical effort to expose a legacy medical-content data model through a new RESTful API in partnership with multiple vendor-partners who are writing API access into their on-hospital-site EMR software. Ken also was a Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks and a Senior Consultant at Medtronic, working in an environment that required strict FDA-specified compliance. He can be reached at experts@cutter.com.