Ralph Rowland Young

Dr. Ralph R. Young has invested his career in assisting individuals, projects, and organizations to improve and helping others to grow. He has a wide diversity of experience, including businesses, Federal Government, local government, military, and oversight. His most rewarding professional role was managing a process improvement group over many years that utilized the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as its improvement framework. His experience is that the CMM and its successor model, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), are very useful in enabling practical and useful improvements. Utilizing these frameworks effectively requires a champion in the organization who can articulate how they support improved project and business results. Ralph has written a series of five books to date: Effective Requirements Practices (that describes what to do); The Requirements Engineering Handbook (that describes how to perform requirements-related work); Project Requirements: A Guide to Best Practices (which is written for program and project managers, to communicate the importance and value of incorporating good requirements practices); Performance-Based Earned Value (with Paul Solomon), which proposes a change to industry Earned Value Management practices; and How to Save a Failing Project: Chaos to Control (with Steve Brady and Dennis Nagle) that identifies and describes good project management practices. Ralph contributed to another recent book, The 77 Sins of Project Management. Ralph enjoys the outdoors, boating, reading, writing, and family activities. He is currently working on his next book concerning leadership. He welcomes comments and feedback and can be reached at ryoungrr@aol.com.