Dave Wirick is a Visiting Scholar at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He is also a Principal Consultant at Babbage Simmel. He has over twenty six years of public-sector experience at the Ohio State University, State of Ohio agencies, and the US Army. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and his current interests are expanding the application of project management in public-sector organizations, increasing the innovative capacity of public organizations, and examining the role of chaos and complexity in project management. He is the leader of Babbage Simmel’s organizational growth program which designs curriculum and provides training and mentoring in project management, organizational development, and business analysis. He is the author of The Project Management Imperative: Mastering the Key Survival Skill for the 21st Century Organization and a frequent speaker on project management and related topics.
David is also a Program Consultant to the Institute of Public Utilities at Michigan State University and serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Dauch College of Business and Economics at Ashland University. He has taught graduate-level project management courses at the Glenn School and at Ashland University, where he built the project management specialization in the Ashland MBA program. At the Ohio State University, he founded the Commission Transformation Program at the National Regulatory Research Institute. He has taught and consulted with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and more that 30 state public utility commissions around the nation in the areas of strategic planning, project management, business analysis, organizational design, management training, process improvement, conflict management, performance assessment, and information technologies. He has written widely on topics including alternative dispute resolution, regulatory accounting, regulatory agency change and effectiveness, utility finances, and information systems.
He is the former Commissioner of Administrative Services for the Ohio Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities and Director of Finance for the Toledo Mental Health Center. He served as a budget analyst for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, the manager of budgeting for the Department of MR&DD, and later as manager a suite of administrative services for that Department, including budgeting and finance, legal affairs, capital construction and budgeting, and audits. He represented the Department on budgeting, finance and administrative issues before the Ohio General Assembly, citizen groups, and oversight agencies. He is a Certified Management Accountant.
David studied at the Ohio State University where he earned his M.A. in Public Administration with a specialization in Finance and did graduate course work beyond the M.A. at Ohio State University and Boston College in Finance and Accounting. At Kent State University, David received his B.A. in Political Science, graduated Summa Cum Laude and was a Distinguished Military Graduate. Other educational endeavors include, University of Michigan Business School, Leading Change: Creating Transformational Competencies (An Executive Program) and The Michigan State University, Graduate School of Business Administration, NARUC Regulatory Studies Program in which he was a participant in 1989 and, from 1997 to 2005, an instructor.
