Tony Welsh, CEO
Tony grew up in South East London. He attended Oxford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1966, then the London School of Economics, where he was awarded a Master of Science in operations research. Tony’s career began at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) under the direction of John Lawrence, a leading light in operational research (O.R.) and editor of the British O.R. Society journal. His work focused on sales forecasting, media scheduling, and measuring the affects of advertising.
In the mid-’70s, Tony moved to a small O.R. consultancy where he worked on a variety of scheduling problems, primarily related to public transport. He also helped advise the Committee of London Clearing Banks (representing the big five U.K. banks at the time) on how to minimize the cost of transporting coins around the country. This led to his joining Cheltonian in 1980, a vendor of minicomputer-based project management software. In addition to being responsible for sales and support in the Americas, he wrote the company’s risk analysis module.
By the end of 1983, Tony and Steve Cook (both living and working for Cheltonian in Houston) formed Welcom, and in 1984 they began to develop project management software for the IBM PC. Tony was responsible for the algorithms in the original MS-DOS versions of Open Plan (time analysis and resource scheduling) and Opera (risk analysis), as well as being heavily involved in the design of the company’s earned value tool, Cobra. With the advent of Microsoft® Windows® the products were in need of a complete rewrite, and Tony was actively involved with the development team coding in C++. Welcom was sold to Deltek, now the owners of Risk+, in March 2006.
Tony has now formed Barbecana, which plans to develop a number of add-ins to Microsoft Project. The first of these, called Full Monte, provides risk analysis of both cost and scheduling using Monte Carlo simulation. This will be no less than the fourth commercially available project risk analysis system Tony has designed and built in the past 30 years.
Tony’s outside interests include racing and rallying classic cars and supporting two charities, WaterAid and Camfed. Since 2007, he has split his time between Houston and London, spending the summers in London.
Handing over a year’s supply of books to the headmaster of Msafiri Secondary School in Rufigi, south of Dar es Salaam.
Tony asking questions about a new well, one small part of a multi-million dollar WaterAid water and sanitation project in Babati, just outside Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania.