Thirty years of delivery leadership.
Distilled into something that works in days.
Catalyst Advisory exists because the problem is real — and because the tools to solve it did not exist until now.
Scott Felten
Founder, Catalyst Advisory
I have spent thirty years building, leading, and rebuilding delivery organizations. Across that time — including nearly three decades at a global market research firm operating in over 100 countries — I held roles from applications developer to Global SVP, and eventually to what amounts to a service-line CTO role: responsible for technology strategy, platform delivery, and engineering governance across mixed teams of full-time engineers and contractors.
The work I am most proud of is not the platforms I built. It is the teams I built. Taking a development organization from waterfall to agile and watching speed to market increase by 500%. Reducing a global client deliverable cycle by a third. Consolidating 83 reporting solutions down to 3 without losing a single client relationship. None of that happened because of a framework. It happened because the team understood what they were building, why it mattered, and how to tell when it was done.
I have also watched what happens when you step back from a team you have invested years in. The practices that required sustained governance — sprint reviews, velocity tracking, security integration, Definition of Done — quietly lapse. The practices that feel good to do — backlog refinement, stakeholder relationships, product thinking — survive on their own. The gap between those two categories is where most delivery organizations are quietly losing ground right now. That gap is what Catalyst Advisory is built to close.
I built the assessment tool, the blueprint engine, and all four deliverable formats myself. What used to require a consulting firm and several weeks of synthesis now takes days. That compression is deliberate — it is what makes it possible to offer fixed-fee engagements with the specificity and depth that actually move organizations.
I work with delivery leaders, heads of engineering, CTOs, and VPs of Technology at mid-market and enterprise organizations across the US and internationally — in person and remotely. I am based in the Cincinnati area.
30 years
Applications development through executive delivery leadership
100+ countries
Global teams · Mixed FTE and contractor delivery models
Market research · SaaS
Platform delivery · Data orchestration · AI integration · Engineering governance
Cincinnati, OH
US and international · In-person and remote
Every delivery organization I have worked in has had the same conversation at some point.
It usually sounds like this: "We were doing really well two years ago. I am not sure what changed." What changed is rarely dramatic. A key facilitator stepped back. A governance structure that depended on one person's attention went unmaintained. A ceremony that felt performative quietly stopped. And the quantitative signal that would have caught it early — the burndown chart, the velocity trend, the sprint completion rate — was never turned on.
By the time the conversation happens, the gap has been growing for months. The team is not broken. The relationships are often still strong. But the structural practices that made delivery predictable have eroded — and without data, nobody can say exactly when or why.
I have had this conversation more times than I can count. From either side of the table. Catalyst Advisory is what I wish had existed every time.
- ·Global delivery organizations spanning 100+ countries
- ·Mixed FTE and contractor teams at scale
- ·Agile transformations from standing start
- ·Enterprise data and reporting platforms
- ·Client-facing SaaS products in competitive markets
- ·Teams in Agile drift after governance withdrawal
- ·Delivery cycles that had grown opaque to leadership
- ·Security postures with active exposure
- ·Velocity patterns invisible in data
- ·Ceremony abandonment that nobody had named
- ·The gap between what the team thinks it is doing and what the data shows is almost always larger than expected
- ·The team is rarely the problem
- ·The fastest path to recovery is almost never a transformation
- ·The board needs four things before it will act: a finding, evidence, a plan, and an ask
What you should expect from every engagement.
Specific over generic.
Every finding in every deliverable cites the actual assessment evidence behind it. Every recommendation has a named owner and a deadline. If a finding cannot be grounded in data, it does not appear in the deliverable.
Deliverables over recommendations.
You walk away with documents you can use that day. Not a strategy deck that requires three more meetings before anything happens. Not a list of things to consider. Four specific, formatted, ready-to-use documents for four different audiences.
Re-engagement over transformation.
Most teams do not need to be rebuilt. They need to be re-anchored. This engagement is calibrated to close the specific practices that have lapsed — not to impose a new framework on a team that already knows how to work well.
Direct over diplomatic.
If the assessment finds a critical risk, the deliverable names it as a critical risk. Softening findings to protect feelings is not a service — it is a disservice. You hired an advisor to tell you what is true, not what is comfortable.
Fixed fee over open-ended.
Every engagement is scoped and priced before work begins. No surprises. No time-and-materials billing after the fact. No scope creep passed to the client.
Have a team in mind?
Start with a conversation. No commitment required.