Patricia A Ensworth

Patricia Ensworth is a business anthropologist with more than 25 years of leadership and management experience for diverse teams in global organizations. Her career has focused upon the development and implementation of innovative technologies that produce new products and services, transforming work process communities and customer experiences.

She began teaching Project Risk Analysis and Quality assurance at NYU SPS during the first year of the MA degree program. For more than a decade she has also led workshops and seminars on project management, business analysis, research methods, and team leadership for the American Management Association.

After earning an MA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University, she applied her academic knowledge for the creation and maintenance of new digital technologies. She began her career in risk and quality as a technical documentation writer and tester for the first desktop computer applications developed at Merrill Lynch. She then founded the quality assurance group for systems development at Moody’s Investors Service, a global credit ratings agency, and led the team for ten years.

Based upon lessons learned about the relationship between quality assurance and project management she published The Accidental Project Manager: Surviving the Transition from Techie to Manager (Wiley 2001). The success of the book enabled her to establish her own management consulting company, Harborlight Management Services. As a consultant she has worked for several well-known global financial services organizations as well as healthcare firms, telecommunications companies, government agencies and non-profits. Her evolution from a QA manager to a risk manager occurred while she was in charge of offshore outsourcing relationships in the testing of fixed income IT at a European investment bank. Since then she has led several risk management initiatives in such areas of e-commerce mobile services, regulatory compliance, and cyberwarfare. She remains active as a cultural anthropologist, publishing articles and giving conference presentations.