Story Time
Been there, solved that.
Truman
Situation
The General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), like other government agencies, was facing increasing pressure to do more with less. Customer expectations were exceeding the capacity of the current workforce, leading to a time of rapid innovation inside FAS. FAS began experimenting with RPA technology and turned to vendor support for guidance and expertise.
The General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), like other government agencies, was facing increasing pressure to do more with less. Customer expectations were exceeding the capacity of the current workforce, leading to a time of rapid innovation inside FAS. FAS began experimenting with RPA technology and turned to vendor support for guidance and expertise.
Solution
Process Standardization
Extensive engagement with business and technology leaders and staff to standardize and redesign process and data flows to enable automation; Building of consensus across the organization through development of a common visions of the future
Software Selection, Acquisition, and Installation
Evaluation of available market solutions for identified business challenges; Analysis of alternatives to inform government selection; Support for IT, Security, and Privacy acquisition, testing, approval, and installation processes
Solution Design
Current state documentation in over-the-shoulder observations, workshops, and reviews of existing training and policy materials; Future state process design in art-of-the possible workshops, client interviews, and leadership discussions; Translation of business requirements into technical requirements and confirmation of feasibility
Solution Development
Integration of development team with end user advisory committee to maintain business/tech alignment throughout development; Establishment of identical development and testing environments with appropriate software, permissions, data and access controls to support development
Solution Deployment
Coaching client business and IT teams through promotion to production; Managing hypercare and production validation with business process owners; Communications with end users to celebrate production, raise awareness of the tool and build excitement to encourage adoption
Solution Sustainment
Proactive communications between Change Management Board and Automation Governance Committee to anticipate system changes that may cause a service outage to allow for mitigation strategies and end-user communications; Ongoing performance monitoring; Prioritization of enhancement requests for development; Continued end-user training and communication
Impact
The result of was the launch of Truman, the first enterprise-wide automation at GSA, and the Process Automation Center, a centralizing hub for the intake, prioritization, development and maintenance of automations at GSA.
Truman saves about 4,000-5,000 hours of employee time per year, leading to improved customer satisfaction and improved employee engagement.
GenAI for Workforce Enablement
Situation
Our client had a rapidly growing workforce across the US and internationally, most of whom were directly interacting with the public. These employees operated in a complex and volatile policy and regulatory environment requiring the client organization to constantly refresh their training materials and employee guidance. When employees encountered complex situations in the field they needed up to date and immediate access to the latest guidance and underlying laws and regulations.
Solution
Tech Assessment
The organization had multiple legacy systems that were siloed and out of date. They also had two new cloud environments currently being implemented. An assessment was conducted and the hosting environment identified. The workforce needed immediate access to guidance in a rapidly evolving regulatory and policy environment, leading to agreement on a GenAI-enabled chat bot solution.
Org Readiness
A review was conducting of existing client governance and policy infrastructure, revealing gaps in leadership’s readiness to govern an AI solution, leading to an understanding that by the time of deployment certain existing governing bodies would need to be prepared to approve and manage an AI solution, and certain new communications and reporting channels would need to be established.
Tool Selection
An evaluation of the organization’s approved LLMs was conducted to identify the LLM most fit for purpose and given the deployment environment. Client leadership had a strong preference that met all technical requirements and some strategic goals. The decision was quickly agreed to by the architecture and development teams.
Risk Strategy
Policy and technology risks were documented throughout the design and development of the solution, in anticipation of ongoing mitigation by AI governing bodies. Guardrails were established during design and development and implemented using policy and technology solutions. A gradual roll-out schedule with intensive hypercare was agreed upon to allow time to prepare the workforce and respond to break/fix and enhancement requests.
Solution Development
A core team of infrastructure, data, risk, and development leads was established. A scrum master and a release train engineer were assigned. The development was submitted for approval, kicking off internal processes to establish and prepare the necessary environments and to grant developer access.
Change Management
People and technology change management processes began immediately. Workforce preparations included preparing leaders to manage the solution on an ongoing basis, and preparing the workforce to use a new tool. The topic was included in employee town halls and leadership communications along with opportunities for Q&A.
Impact
The resulting solution has been proven in a test environment and is set to go live to 50,000+ field employees in Q4 2025. Based on the early success of the program and the resulting excitement across the organization, we have also been able to develop a GenAI roadmap for the client using this solution as the launching point for an enterprise-wide platform of solutions.
Think big. Start small. Scale fast.
Situation
A large, complex federal finance agency faced challenging IT and business conditions, including siloed data, long customer response times, slashed budgets, and hiring freezes. As a result, business units were eager to identify technology-based solutions to business challenges. One business unit saw a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) demo at a conference, and was eager to learn more. Through several in-depth conversations we were able to identify and document an excellent use case for an RPA pilot. We developed a proof of concept and were requested to implement. Based on the excitement from this initial small pilot, other business units became interested in identifying opportunities for automation to improve the customer experience and employee satisfaction.
Solution
Centralized Model
As use cases proliferated across business units, a hub was established within IT to coordinate across customers, manage and prioritize resource allocation, and identify opportunities to reuse solutions as they were developed. The hub also redirected customers when RPA was not the best solution to their challenge. Over time, this centralized model served to demonstrate to leadership the need for a common procurement approach, ultimately leading to an enterprise-wide contract vehicle.
Business + IT
Though the business units were initially our customers, we began by creating communication channels to formally bring IT in as a partner. The business saw IT as a roadblock rather than an enabler. IT saw the business as overly demanding and unsympathetic. The development of a new centralized hub was an opportunity for both sides to repair the relationship while working together to build a new enterprise-wide capability.
Leadership Champions
Across business and IT divisions, champions were identified to simplify coordination and provide top-down direction when needed. Champions were influential and enthusiastic leaders who played a key role in stakeholder and communications management plans. They helped break through road blocks and clear disagreements.
Supply vs. Demand
The centralized hub served to throttle up and down supply and demand. Demonstrating a demand for AI and Automation technologies was critical to securing investment. However, generating too much demand before the infrastructure was in place to meet it would lead to frustrated customers and long wait times. Having a centralized hub with a single front door allowed organizational leadership to to intentionally dial up or down demand generation according to resource availability.
Change Management
Within the centralized hub was a governance structure to manage both technology and organizational change management, with leaders from across the organization involved as appropriate. Technology change management leveraged the existing processes and infrastructure with added checks to manage vendors and licenses, and to identify opportunities for solution reuse or collaboration. Organizational change management included education, re-skilling, adoption, and policy adaptation efforts.
Impact
The new program office centralized multiple projects in a single location, creating an engine to drive innovation, action, and culture change across the organization. While individual solutions reduced contact center wait times and paper backlogs, the centralized program collected and shared lessons learned and best practices, while developing the capacity internally to recommend and deploy enterprise-wide solutions.
Innovation through Integration
Situation
Our clients’ employees were increasingly gaining access to AI through the various technology platforms they use to complete their work – particularly the Microsoft 365 platform. While Microsoft sought to put AI in the hands of every end user via Co-Pilot on the M365 platform, we noticed that our clients were not yet ready to take advantage of the transformative potential of these tools. Although almost all of our clients were paying for M365 licenses, very few of them understood the advanced capabilities they were buying, and even fewer were beginning to use these tools. Almost none of them had a plan in place to train their workforce, deploy and maintain AI solutions, update relevant policies, or migrate legacy apps and consolidate licenses.
As our clients’ trusted advisors on business strategy and innovation, we should be able to present a unified plan for what they should do next. We should also be using these tools ourselves to innovate our project delivery methodologies and reduce the cost of our services.
Solution
Primary Source Research
I surveyed my peers and clients to gather anecdotal evidence supporting my theory that the new capabilities in M365 were being under-utilized by our project teams and our clients.
Market Analysis
I evaluated government spend on Microsoft licenses over time and government spend on AI over time, plus publicly avialable contract information to estimate current availability of M365 and, therefore, Copilot across the government. I compared this against our own experience on client site to estimate the problem of underutilization today and project into the future.
Business Case Development
Using the market analysis and anecdotes from client delivery, I developed a business case for firm investment to support the creation of an initiative to support our clients in the getting the most out of the licenses they already have through education, solution design, and solution development.
Solution Demonstration
Using firm investment dollars and a team of interested, engaged practitioners, we designed and built a widely applicable solution that integrated multiple components across the M365 platform and insights from CoPilot, giving us a tangible product to demonstration within the firm and to clients.
Vendor Engagement
I engaged trusted contacts at Microsoft to compare our anecdotal experience and market data with theirs, confirming what we thought to be true, and building a mutually supportive relationship.
Client Engagement
With the support of a client demo, we developed collateral to educate our project leaders on the ways we can support our clients, and to make our clients aware of the power of these integrated M365 solutions. We also built internal processes to efficiently train and deploy staff, develop client proposals and build prototypes, to make it easier for our project teams to sell and deliver this work.
Impact
We now have a scalable and growing business operating model that balances supply and demand: we are both training and hiring for the skills required to deliver increasingly complex solutions at an increased velocity, while also generating market demand through education and awareness efforts, both internally and externally. We have a pipeline of $350M+ of potential opportunities within the next two years and are now positioned to win and deliver the work.