Mark Kozak-Holland

Mark Kozak-Holland PhD, PMP, IPMA D, Cert.APM

About the Lessons from History Author

Mark is a senior project manager and business consultant/architect (certified in the Consultant Profession) with 30+ years of business experience (entered workforce in 1983). He specializes in helping organizations evaluate how emerging technologies can impact their business, design solutions, and realize their goals. Mark puts a different spin on complex business problems by applying lessons from history. He is the founder of the Lessons-from-History series, and has written a number books for the series. Mark is very passionate about history and believes it has great relevance in business today. A good analogy helps to simplify, frame and put today's complex projects into context, and builds a better and deeper understanding.

Mark delivers seminars for project manager, business executives, and decision makers. Mark regularly speaks at major project management conferences including Project World, and PMI chapters, and at organizations, and businesses. He has authored many white papers, and writes magazine articles regularly.

Mark is very passionate about history and sees its potential use as an education tool in business today. As a result, he has developed a “lesson-from-history” series, which is for organizations applying today's Information Technology (IT) to common business problems. It is written for primarily business and IT professionals looking for inspiration for their projects. It uses relevant historical case studies to examine how historical projects and emerging technologies of the past solved complex problems.

The series looks at historical projects and then draws comparisons to challenges encountered in today’s projects. It outlines the stages involved in delivering a complex project providing a step-by-step guide to the project deliverables. It vividly describes the crucial lessons from historical projects and complements these with some of today's best practices. It makes the whole learning experience more memorable. The series should inspire the reader as these historical projects were achieved with a less sophisticated emerging technology.

Influences

The series was very much influenced by James Burke who advocated an alternative approach to using history in business. Mark published his first book titled "On-line, On-time, On-budget - Titanic lessons for the e-business executive" in 2002. The book explains in layman's terms how to deliver an Internet project successfully using Titanic as a case study. He has continued to publish every 18 months.

Resume

Mark has extensive experience in all aspects of business transformation (people, process or technology). He has gained consulting and project management experience internationally across multiple industries in all phases of projects (end-to-end and into operations). Through his 30+ years career he has delivered hundreds of client consulting engagements and projects globally.

Mark has worked for HP, IBM, Compaq, Tandem and SHL Systemhouse.

For more detail see: www.linkedin.com/in/markkozakhollland

  
Awards and recognition

Received the Tandem Excellence award for the development of the corporate Business Availability Service, deployed globally.
Winner at OCTAS, a competition honored by the Fédération de l'informatique du Québec for most innovative IT project. This is a major occasion in the province of Quebec: http://www.fiq.qc.ca/evenements.htm#laureats
Compaq Services recognition for the development, evolution, and promotion of the Business Discovery program.

Education

B.Sc. with Joint Honours degree in Computer Science and Statistics 1980-1983 (University of Salford, UK).

PMP through the Project Management Institute (2011)

IPMA D through the Project Management Association of Canada (2012)

Cert.APM, Certified Agile Project Manager through the Project Management Association of Canada (2013)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the Salford University Business School, UK (2014) -  (see Thesis)

Other Positions (Non-Profit Organization)

Current President of Whitchurch-Stouffville Soccer club 2001- (membership 1600). Mark is also a certified level 4 referee, and has senior coaching certificates.

http://stouffvillesoccer.org/