Case Study: Shape Up or Face the Consequences
A DoD client with a $3 billion budget was at a critical crossroads: either improve the culture, leadership, and accountability, delineation of authority and processes across five geographic locations and a workforce of 5,000 personnel—or fail to meet customer requirements while simultaneously facing annual cost increases of over 20%.
Our team met with senior leaders, middle management, and line organizations to gain a clear, multifaceted understanding of the issues with which they were grappling and to understand how the organization needed to mature. We also diagnosed the reason each of the previous multiple attempts at change had failed earlier.
From this understanding, we worked collaboratively to develop a strategic roadmap, including milestones that needed to be met at the appropriate intervals along the way. We delineated how to meet the organization’s most audacious strategic initiatives and how to address the client’s most pressing issues.
We then helped move the organization from where it stood to a place where the group was able to realize each of the major growth objectives we’d set out to achieve at the start.
As a result, the division realized $90 million worth of cost savings within the first year following full implementation. Revenue increased 23% and the workforce was optimally realigned to meet the challenges and disruptive changes in the defense aerospace industry.
Case Study: When Your Key Talent Walks Out the Door
One of our technology and aerospace defense clients was faced with losing its competitive edge in their market segment. Company leadership lacked the skill sets and experience required to maintain their competitive position in the market amidst the myriad of changes taking place in the industry. Market share and profitability were down 16% in a two-year period, as key customer projects were behind schedule and the pipeline of new work was drying up. Customers simply began to lose confidence in the client’s ability to deliver projects on time.
The dilemma in which the client found itself was due, in large part, to the recent retirements of some of the most experienced corporate leaders. What was left as a younger, less experienced handful of fledgling leaders, without the institutional knowledge to make the right decisions in a timely manner.
Our team consulted with and coached their cadre of young leaders, several of whom had a military background, to determine where there were gaps in the requisite leadership skills.
We performed leadership assessments and took inventory of skill sets the leaders already possessed versus those still needed. Next, we developed a prioritized list of leadership skills that would be needed to meet the demands of the circumstances the company faced.
The results were beyond impressive.
Within just 13 months, the company completed several complex technology projects, worth over $176 million. In addition, they not only regained the market share that had slowly eroded over the two years prior, they also gained an additional 8%. Our client also added two major government clients to their pipeline of future work, representing a 17% increase in profit.
Finally, the company implemented a comprehensive leadership program as a result of our engagement, using our executive summary as their benchmark for leadership training.
Case Study: Moving from Broken to Benchmark
We were asked by a leading project management and systems engineering firm to help break the stalemate they were experiencing for a critical, $137 million communication technology project. This was needed for public safety across several states and had the sponsorship of senior company, government and congressional officials.
The organization had launched the project a year before our engagement, and they were experiencing protracted delays in meeting critical design milestones. In addition, the early system design suffered from critical failures, causing significant concerns across the stakeholder community.
We met with the leads of every functional area to develop project recovery and execution plans that incorporated key elements of project management, systems engineering, and system integration approaches.
We then formed tiger teams commissioned to identify the holistic and interrelated set of problems the project faced. We rewrote a significant portion of the project requirements to ensure all project objectives were clearly understood by our client and by the vendors with whom they had contracted. Our team also assisted our client in modifying vendor contracts to ensure contractual performance requirements were well-defined and the misunderstandings in scope were cleared.
Our efforts led to a major project turnaround that yielded a 17-month reduction in schedule, a 9% cost savings, and the completion of all project requirements. Finally, the system that was delivered is still in use today and the project is used as the benchmark against which other projects are executed.
Case Study: Effectively Managing the Government Acquisition Process
Our customer was in desperate need to award a $1 billion Service Category I, ten-year contract for the operations, maintenance, and sustainment of critical infrastructure of twelve subsystems and over a million configuration items, dispersed throughout ten locations across the country.
However, they also needed to transform the approach they had previously implemented, as they were experiencing a myriad of configuration management, Reliability, Maintainability & Availability (RMA), and sustainment-related issues that made operating the equipment over the long term technically and financially unattainable.
To exacerbate the criticality of their dilemma, our client was well behind schedule with pre-acquisition activities, as the current contract had just over a year of performance left. This left them only a fraction of the time needed to put together an acquisition effort of this scale and magnitude.
Our team provided the acquisition expertise to guide the government customer team through the entire RFP, source selection, contract award, and contract management processes.
We broke the process down into multiple phases, beginning with requirements development and industry engagement, through acquisition strategy development and proposal evaluations. We also created an aggressive, resource-loaded schedule to establish the tempo and sequencing of over a thousand tasks required to complete the acquisition.
A critical success factor in this engagement was our ability to seamlessly integrate our experience and skill sets with those of the government acquisition team in order to complete each of the phases within the timeframe we laid out.
Our client was able to award the new contract successfully, including a critical transition period—and they did this for $100 million less than the Government Cost Estimate (GCE).
The acquisition was developed and executed so well that our client organization has modeled several other acquisitions since then using our approach—and they continue to use this currently.