Biographies

Meet Our Professionals

Tom Cocotis

Tom is a co-founder of RTConfidence and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Tom has led product development as a director or executive for multiple start-up companies for over 20 years, including SRS Imaging, where he was the founder and President and raised over $5 million in venture capital.

He has driven the development and test of dozens of products including custom multifunction laser printers, RFID readers with RF analog switching systems and directional antennas, cloud-based FIPS-140 cryptographic online transaction systems, mobile device printing systems, enterprise-level SSDs for cloud servers, web application development, and project management software designed to help engineering teams hit business critical deadlines.

He holds 9 patent awards in areas including probabilistic scheduling, remote storage data security, imagining, wireless printing, secure network transactions, hardware-based RF signal networking. At RTConfidence, he has led the software development team to create risk-adjusted project schedule software with “lead measures” to provide the early warnings required to harden schedule commitments. He holds a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine and an M.S. in Management and Leadership from Pepperdine University.

Michael M. Bissonette

Mike is a seasoned business executive, entrepreneur, adjunct professor, author, and corporate consultant. His career includes over 40 years of Product Development within several industries (i.e., aerospace & defense, consumer electronics, industrial equipment and services, clean technology, and software as a service). He has held executive-level positions in numerous functional disciplines, notably in the areas of project, program, PMO (project/program management office) management, and portfolio management. His diverse background has afforded Mike the opportunity to personally experience those practices which are considered “best” within the various industries and disciplines – ergo, the genesis of his publications and RTConfidence products.

Before forming RTConfidence, Mike was a Division General Manager and Officer of AeroVironment, Inc. He was also an executive at Western Digital, where he led many successful organizational transformation initiatives to get the company through a difficult era within the extremely competitive HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SSD (Solid State Devices) industries. He started his career as a radar system engineer (specializing in digital signal processing, phased array antenna design, and modeling and simulation) in the aerospace & defense industry, and rapidly entered the program management world, where he successfully managed the development of several new products and services. He eventually became a valued organizational change master. Mike holds BSEE, MSEE, and MBA degrees and is PMI® certified as a PfMP® (Portfolio Management Professional). Please preview my introductory video below.

Payson Hall

Payson is a Project Scientist at RTConfidence, Inc., a former U.S. Army Ranger, and consulting project manager for Catalysis Group, Inc. in Sacramento. Formally trained as a software engineer, his early career included software development and hardware/software system integration. As his career progressed, his role shifted to include increasing project management responsibilities.

Today, he coaches project managers, teaches project management skills, consults, and performs project reviews in various fields, including transportation, communication, software development, hardware development, education, financial services, social services, and healthcare.

Payson has consulted on various projects in both the public and private sectors throughout North America and Europe during his 40-year professional career. He has published over 100 project management articles, developed numerous project management and problem-solving classes, and wrote a book on project sponsorship. Payson is sought after as a conference speaker specializing in demystifying project management topics and communicating important ideas entertaining audiences. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science.

David Maeschen

David is a principal at RTConfidence, Inc. who joined the team in 2017. He has spent a decade in defense research, including five years focusing on physical oceanography and hydrodynamics at Dynamics Technology and five years focusing on electromagnetics from radar to X-ray at SRS Technologies. His research also included analysis, modeling, and simulation of sensors, scattering, and systems. Moreover, he has extensive computer graphics development experience for scientific visualization.

David spent another decade in commercial printers and systems developing software, firmware, and drivers at SRS Imaging, CalComp, and Toshiba Computer Systems. He has studied economics and finance and holds a B.A. in Physics from the University of Chicago.

John Newton

John is a principal at RTConfidence, Inc. who joined the team in 2018. Throughout his career, he has lent his development, troubleshooting, and overall strategic thinking to various corporations and start-ups in multiple industries. Solving systemic problems comes from John’s background in working on all types of technology, including low-level hardware programming, embedded systems, web technologies, database optimization, network performance, and user interface. John holds an MBA from The University of California Irvine and a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Texas.