About
Practitioners who founded and ran businesses long before we began to advise them
Between them, Alex McDonnell and Paula Lawton bring more than 20 years of senior executive experience. Alex led IDOC International as Group CEO, ran Dell’s EMEA Factory Outlet as GM, and was GM of IT Service Delivery and Director of Business Excellence at Eircom (now eir). He started the first of several businesses of his own back in 1984: Technodisc, a business process outsourcing company. Paula ran Maidenform’s EMEA distribution centre as General Manager. In 2003 they put that experience to work for others and founded Expertivity. Since then we have taken it inside more than 70 organisations, rolling up our sleeves alongside their people until the new way of working is running.
Who we are
Expertivity Technologies helps modern organisations execute better, in financial services, insurance, healthcare, government and technology. These are the sectors where most of the economy now works, and where productivity is hardest to improve. Most of the work is invisible, demand arrives through many channels, and value depends on handoffs between teams and functions.
We have worked with more than 2,000 teams in over 70 organisations in Ireland, Europe and the United States, typically raising productivity by 20–40%. We work as practitioner consultants: we learn the work, agree the changes with the people who do it, and stay until the results are being sustained without us.
How we think about management
Traditional management is not broken. It was designed for a different kind of work. Hierarchy, functional budgets and supervision were built for predictable, local, repeatable tasks. Today’s work is interdependent, digital and cross-functional, and it is done by people who expect clarity rather than control.
Our approach updates management for that reality rather than throwing it away. It keeps the discipline of operational excellence, drawn from Lean and systems thinking, and adds the structures most organisations lack: designed interfaces between teams, process ownership, and senior teams that make connected decisions together. This is the thinking behind Structured Collaboration and the Business Execution Canvas®.
Our history
Since 2003
- 2003: Alex McDonnell and Paula Lawton found the firm, after senior careers in multinational technology, telecoms and manufacturing.
- 2003 to 2019: programmes across Irish and international financial services, insurance, healthcare and government. ServiceForce is developed as a lean operations management system for service teams.
- 2019: Lean Service Provider of the Year (Lean Business Ireland).
- 2020: McLaw and Associates and Xpertivity, both founded by Alex and Paula, come together under one brand.
- Today: Expertivity works from Limerick and Kildare in Ireland, and from Connecticut and Texas in the United States, serving clients in Ireland, Europe and North America. Structured Collaboration and its tools are published at structuredcollaboration.com.
Our founders
Alex McDonnell and Paula Lawton
Alex McDonnell
Alex started out as an engineer at Ericsson, where he helped set up its original software development centre: his first experience of managing complexity at scale, in teams whose output depended on each other’s work. He went on to Eircom (now eir) as GM of IT Service Delivery and Director of Business Excellence, then became GM of Dell’s EMEA Factory Outlet. As Group CEO of IDOC International he led its growth and sale to Bowne of New York, founding Bowne Global Solutions. He has founded and scaled several businesses, starting in 1984 with Technodisc, a business process outsourcing company, and served as a non-executive director of Ask Jeeves Europe.
Alex holds an MSc in Strategic Quality Management and an MBA from the University of Limerick, is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and completed MIT Sloan’s executive programme in Business Dynamics. He has been a guest lecturer at Syracuse University, the University of Limerick, DCU, TU Dublin and DIT, and developed the Business Execution Canvas® and Structured Collaboration.
Paula Lawton
Paula has spent more than 30 years in operations, first running them and then improving them for others. At Maidenform’s EMEA distribution centre in Shannon she rose from Purchasing and Inventory Manager to Operations Manager and then General Manager, responsible for EMEA strategy, operations, sales and distribution. Along the way she cut stock holding by 30% while supporting sales growth, and took the centre from three shifts to one. Earlier, at Burle Industries, she led the company’s ERP implementation, from the stock room through electronics production to management reporting. As a Senior Associate with O’Kelly Sutton, she then advised SMEs in Ireland and the UK on structure, process and performance reporting.
At Expertivity, Paula leads delivery of our Lean and operational excellence programmes. She has worked with the senior teams of Bank of Ireland, Irish Life, New Ireland, PermanentTSB, Rabobank/ACCBank, FBD Insurance, ICON and Kforce Clinical Research in the USA, and with senior clinicians and front-line staff in healthcare. She combines practical Lean methods with coaching and leadership development, so the capability stays with the client when we leave.
Paula holds a Diploma in Lean and Six Sigma Quality Systems from the University of Limerick, and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, a Master NLP Practitioner and a qualified life and business coach.
Associate Partners
Peter Dowd
Peter has spent more than 30 years designing and delivering operating-model and process change in banking, insurance and wider financial services. He spent 18 years in senior roles at an Irish bank, including leading its Lean architecture function, before moving into consulting, where he has worked with more than 30 client organisations. He is known for finding the operating-model problems behind cost, customer and risk symptoms, and for getting executives to agree changes that can actually be implemented.
Peter holds an MSc in Organisational Behaviour from the IMI and Trinity College Dublin, is PMP® certified, and is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.
Michael MacCurtain
Michael brings more than 30 years of operations and operational excellence leadership in multinational companies. He spent 15 years at Intel Ireland as a Manufacturing Operations Manager and Lean Leader, winning two Global OpEx Awards, then worked as Manufacturing Manager at Xerox Ireland and European Continuous Improvement Lead at Office Depot. As VP of Business Transformation and Optimisation at Citi in Ireland, he led seven Target Operating Model reviews across Europe, each meeting or beating a 20% cost-reduction target, and trained more than 400 managers in Lean Six Sigma. As Global Operations Manager at Novartis Global Business Services for nine years, he cut operating costs by 3–5% a year and automated 15 business processes with Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI.
Michael holds an MSc in Strategic Quality Management from the University of Limerick and a Bachelor of Business from ITT Dublin, and is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a PMI-certified project manager and an Agile Scrum Master.
Books
The thinking behind our work
- Who Designed Your Organisation? How to build an organisation that works right first time (the latest book)
- The Future of Management Is Not Management: a guide to upgrading management for the modern workforce (the earlier book)
Talk to us
A short conversation is usually the quickest way to see where to start.