Federal Agency Modernizes With Enterprise Resource Planning Overhaul

Challenge

A federal agency sought to design and implement the largest business modernization and transformation effort in its history. The plan was to merge its enterprise resource planning systems into a common, modernized platform that would simplify, streamline, standardize, and unify its business operations while improving auditability. 

With such an immense scope and scale, the project was expected to affect at least 200,000 people across the enterprise. Personnel working in a wide range of business activities—including supply, fulfillment, financial management, asset acquisition, transportation, operations, maintenance, and real property—would likely see changes to business processes, policies, regulations, training, and more. By the early 2030s, the agency planned to achieve a fully integrated program enabling more effective operations on a large scale. 

Approach

The agency turned to us for support with organizational change management, human-centered design, and business enterprise architecture review and mapping. The work involved significant interaction with the agency’s business system and project management teams along with multiple stakeholders across the enterprise. Our team: 

• Leveraged human-centered, participatory approaches combined with structured models and behavioral science to support enterprise wide transformational change 
• Used Agile and project management practices to anticipate and respond to environmental changes, institutional needs, and emerging requirements 
• Developed detailed stakeholder analyses that would help leadership visualize the stakeholder environment and would shape the timing and messaging of communications activities used to engage stakeholders 
• Created a strategic plan to deploy human-centered design across all phases of the developer security operations process, including training, release and fielding, testing, and security 
• Collaborated closely with project management office leaders to ensure that human-centered design was woven into the fabric of their collaboration with vendors and the multi-functional capabilities team  
• Worked with the agency’s business enterprise architecture team to help develop future-state business process models featuring an extensive library that showed how different processes and systems flowed into information exchanges and operational activation 

Impact

Our efforts delivered measurable improvements in awareness, engagement, and operational efficiency.  We made a significant impact by: 

• Increasing awareness through forums enabling personnel to ask questions and understand system changes 
• Organizing and facilitating a series of town halls attracting over 500 participants, helping prepare personnel for the project’s minimum viable capability release 
• Improving stakeholder engagement by creating networks of more than 120 change agents to support, guide, and own the change in their respective organizations 
• Developing a more streamlined, efficient future-state plan after reviewing stakeholder pain points and gaps during business process reengineering sessions 
• Creating an improved user experience by delivering a system that’s easy to use, intuitive, responsive, and accessible