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About Bonnie Short
Bio Bonnie Biafore is an independent project management consultant, award-winning author, and entertaining speaker. As a consultant, she whips projects into shape by focusing on business and project objectives, building effective project teams, and applying her meticulous organizational skills. She has fun, makes new friends (and the occasional enemy) on every project, but mainly gets things done. Several years ago, a good friend started the chain of events that led Bonnie to writing the Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Personal Finance. The book turned out well, but sadly is out of print. Bonnie's writing career was launched, nonetheless. She's authored more than a dozen books including the award-wining Better Investing Stock Study Handbook, Project 2007: The Missing Manual, Quicken 2008: The Missing Manual, QuickBooks 2008: The Missing Manual, and the Visio 2007 Bible. She writes articles for Web sites including bankrate.com, interest.com, Microsoft's, and others. She
has a mostly unused Bachelor of Science in Architecture from MIT
and an occasionally useful Master's of Science in Structural Engineering
from Columbia University. Don't hold this against her. She's quite
nice, actually. Long Bio Bonnie
Biafore started life in Bethlehem, PA. Her writing career began
in grade school, when she belonged to the Creative Writing Club
at Moravian Preparatory School (now Moravian Academy.) She can still
recall the club's major project, when environmental awareness was
just starting - SAVE: Scott and Amy Value the Earth. Why doesn't
she recycle these brain cells? She was also pretty astute in the
math department. Then she decided to go to MIT. After a bit more than four years, attributable to a complete inability to decide on a major, she graduated from MIT in February 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design (one of MIT's Architecture degrees.) She amazed her Architecture professors and fellow students with a seemingly endless list of math and engineering classes. But, computers were another matter. Of course, there were no PCs then. MIT was proud to say that they had an IBM 360 serial number 1. She wasn't much good at programming, or at least wasn't that interested. (More on this later.) Always
prone to generating a lively schedule, she progressed from Social
Committee chairman to president of her dorm. At the tender age of,
what 18, her campaign slogan was "Hysterectomy now!" Politics
were not, nor are, her forte, although she regrets her less than
extraordinary performance in dormitory politics. Eventually, she sorted out that the problem with Architecture was that there wasn't enough math. (Not entirely true, but she has since figured out that she is occasionally wrong.) So, off to Columbia University for a Master's degree in Structural Engineering. She can still recall her father, a concrete contractor, complaining about those ?/#%$ architects who design those crazy buildings, and the ?/#%$ engineers who design the reinforcing steel so close that you can't pour the concrete. She worked as a structural engineer for several years, and helped design several pre-stressed concrete cable-stay bridges. (A short sidebar: in 2000, she actually saw her first real-life cable-stay bridge, being built in Cambridge, MA.) Her engineering job led her to Computer-Aided Design (CAD), which entertained her for a number of years. Following the Graphic Data System (GDS) software through a number of owners, she worked for McDonnell Douglas, EDS, Graphic Data System, Inc., and finally Convergent Group. Always a renaissance person, she ended up performing many aspects of her projects: technical sales, gathering requirements, designing interfaces and systems, programming(!), writing documentation and training, managing systems, and managing projects. Working with the clients was great. Learning how they did business, and making software do what the client needed was fun. But, corporate politics were not, nor are, her forte. Usually at odds with management, her corporate life was a never-ending struggle to find a good match to her personal work philosophy. When Convergent Group killed the GDS software, she took her chance to leave the corporate rat race, and get on the independent consultant track. The work isn't as steady, but it's a lot more fun. As a good friend opined, "You're boss is an asshole, but now you know what to do about it."
With almost 10 years of professional writing on her resume, the books keep rolling out, and she's expanding into articles, columns, training, and creating templates. For information on Bonnie's ever-increasing catalog of published tomes, click here.
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