Carolyn Walter manages software development at the Flanders, NJ Instrument Systems Division (ISD) of Diagnostic Products Co (DPC, Los Angeles, CA). She's held that post through the company's rapid growth of the past five years, leading her department to more reliable delivery dates and greater accuracy, while retaining experienced employees and bringing in new ones.
"This company is cutting edge," Walter says. "The challenge for me was to manage the growth and staff the department so we could not only maintain and enhance what we've got, but also work on brand-new software."
Cirrus Diagnostics, now DPC ISD, became part of DPC in 1992. The company's medical diagnostics include mechanical, electrical and chemical aspects. Some of the company's IT pros write low-level code, some work on user interfaces. Their different skills require different kinds of supervision.
Ramping up
The company's recent growth from 230 to 500 employees included an increase from seventeen to forty-two folks in Walter's department. The group ramped up from working on one project at a time to handling six new projects and four maintenance projects. And of the six new projects, four are entirely new, "projects with about a two-year lifecycle," Walter says.
Working with the software engineering institute of Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), Walter put in processes to structure development and catch errors early. It starts with a four-day brainstorming session to block out the project, assign tasks and estimate completion dates.
"If you catch your mistakes early in the requirements and design phase, you save a lot of time," Walter says. "Then, when you're done, the quality is very high and it's measurable."
Rigorous planning
Tracking team members' time makes it possible to predict delivery dates accurately, adjust schedules, add members to support slow-growth areas and juggle responsibilities to meet expected launch dates.
"Now we can plan when we're going to be done, and people can believe us," Walter says.
Increased complexity required new software development technologies, like Unified Modeling Language, Rational Rose, Rational RealTime, VB.NET and RTOS-32. Walter had to learn more about managing people in order to train them to use the new technologies.
"It's been really interesting transitioning them from an old technology to a new technology," she says. "I work as hard on that as I do on the process itself."
Communicating
Internal communications became an issue, too, as the company grew. New, better-scheduled ways had to be found to exchange information among mechanical, electrical, systems and software departments. They now meet twice weekly so everyone stays in the loop.
"We've really had to work hard to set up good mechanisms and have these discussions with each other," Walter says.
The ten people reporting directly to her include three supervisors, which will soon increase to six. "We'll have a leader and a supervisor for each new project," she explains. Complicated, but evidently satisfying: only one of the original seventeen has left the group since Walter came on board.
Raised to be people
"My mother always said she wasn't raising us to be girls, she was raising us to be people," Walter says. "I'm not afraid to be different."
In high school in Andover, MA Walter took advanced math classes, woodshop and drafting. Since she's six feet tall, it was natural for her to play on the boys' basketball team.
She entered Bryant College (Smithfield, RI) in 1980 as a general business student, then transferred to the University of Lowell (Lowell, MA) to major in math with a concentration in CS. One of her babysitting clients, a project leader at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), noticed her affinity for her studies and brought her in to interview for an internship.
DEC and Nalco
She worked two internships at DEC and was hired as a software engineer when she received her BS in 1985. "That experience really instilled in me the idea of living up to their motto, 'You just have to do the right thing,'" she says.
She also got married that year, and three years later moved to Chicago to accommodate her husband's ChE career. Walter was able to transfer within Digital, which had a plant in the Chicago area.
Later she went to work as a scientific application programmer at Nalco Chemical Co (Naperville, IL). She found the work fascinating, dipping into ChE and thermodynamics to support the sales force and create modeling software for the R&D lab.
In ten years at Nalco she advanced to systems specialist. She worked on Trend Check, a statistical process control program, and a Lotus Notes tech support product for the 3,000-member global sales force. The goal was to answer customers' questions in the field.
To use the new system, the Nalco sales force had to be upgraded from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Then Notes had to be loaded onto each machine. Walter traveled around the world, upgrading machines and training sales personnel on both the operating system and the application.
Back to the East
In 1998 Walter, her husband and their two daughters, who are now ten and seventeen, moved back to the East Coast. She joined Weidenhammer Systems Corp (Wyomissing, PA) as a consultant, then moved to DPC. The supervisor job she went into was a stretch for her, but she learned fast. She was promoted to manager within a year.
"I enjoy it very much here and the people I work with are just top-notch," Walter reflects. "It felt like coming home when I got to DPC.
"The values here are so similar to those at DEC: do the right thing and always think about what the customer needs. Work really, really hard and just push to get it right."
Wherever the value system originated, it's working right for Carolyn Walter.
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