Mark J. Christensen, Ph.D., is an independent consultant based in St. Charles, Illinois, USA. Dr. Christensen serves a national client base, offering process and project evaluation services, and project management training. His customers include industrial, governmental, and academic organizations. Dr. Christensen is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS). He chairs the Press Operations Committee of the Computer Society. He is co author with Dr. Richard Thayer of an upcoming book (1st Quarter 2002) describing how to apply the IEEE Software Engineering Standards to the Management of software projects. He holds a BS degree in physics and mathematics from Wayne State University and an MS in physics from Purdue, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. His doctorate from Wayne State is in probability theory. Richard H. Thayer, Ph.D., is consultant in the field of software engineering and project management. Prior to this hew was a Professor of Software Engineering at California State University, Sacramento, California, United States of America. Dr. Thayer travels widely where he consults and lectures on software engineering, project management, software engineering standards, software requirements engineering, and software quality assurance. He is a Visiting Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. His technical interests lay in software project management and software engineering standards. Dr. Thayer is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Computer Society, and the IEEE Software Engineering Standards Committee. He is a principle author for a Standard for a Concept of Operations (ConOps) document (IEEE std 1362 1998) and a principle author of the Standard for Software project Management Plans (IEEE std 1058 1998). He is also an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) where he served on the AIAA Technical Committee on Computer Systems, and he is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is also a registered professional engineer. He holds a BSEE degree and an MS degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana (1962) and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara (1979) each in Electrical Engineering.