Management Consulting Firm Leads IT Transformation Initiative

About the Client 

Realizing One's Potential 

This management consulting firm comes from humble beginnings. It started as a part-time physical therapy subcontractor and quickly moved on to supporting the Department of Health and Human Services. After seeing its impact on the healthcare community, it decided to build out its practice — providing advisory services to some of the world's largest and most complex organizations. 

The Situation

Aligning IT to Strategic Business Goals  

Organizations the world over realized the importance of IT during the pandemic. Those who invested early were able to navigate the waves of change better. Others were forced to quickly pivot to keep up. Such was the case for this management consulting firm's federal government client.

After years of working business as usual, the federal government client knew it could no longer operate as it usually would. And one of the first areas it wanted to tackle was transforming its IT department. 

Not only would aligning IT to broader organization goals help IT teams and employees work better and improve engagement, efficiencies, and outcomes, but it would also be able to attain financial benefits and business agility as a result. 

Given its track record of working with similar clients, the management consulting firm was excited to undertake an initiative of this magnitude. But after conducting a quick workforce analysis, it realized that it had a critical gap on its team that would hold it back from moving forward with this intuition. 

Rather than turn away this client, the firm decided to explore on-demand talent acquisition to supplement its teams. In doing so, it could find a subject matter expert to lead and execute the initiative without the hassle of finding, onboarding, and training a full-time hire. 

The Solution

An Independent Engagement Manager with Extensive IT Experience 

Knowing how quickly it needed to find someone to fill the engagement manager role, the firm set out to conduct market research. After reviewing several providers, it decided to explore Graphite's model. The firm liked that it only had to pay for what it needed, the speed at which it could find someone, and, more importantly, the white glove service. 

With all those factors in mind, the firm booked a call with the Account Executive (AE) to dig deeper into the platform. Once connected, the AE gave the firm an in-depth look into our vetting process, the depth of our expert network, and the various features it could leverage to better engage, communicate, and pay experts. 

Pleased with the level of detail, a subsequent meeting was scheduled to discuss the project scope and criteria. In that meeting, the firm described what they were looking for in an independent expert. It wanted a professional with at least 8-10 years of experience, of which 2-3 years of experience was in a prior project/engagement management role in a consulting environment (preferably MBB or Big Four). 

It was also important for the firm that the selected individual have high emotional intelligence as they would need to build working relationships across all levels for the end client. It would be a bonus if the selected expert had prior experience working with public-sector organizations and the Department of Defense. 

The AE used this information to identify 47 candidates that matched the firm's criteria on Graphite. Four candidates were presented, along with some preliminary screening questions issued by the firm. After reviewing each candidate, the firm scheduled interviews using Graphite’s in-app video conferencing solutions with the best two. 

While both candidates were great, the firm decided to move forward with an independent engagement manager with extensive IT transformation experience in organizations like IBM and KPMG. 

The Results

Improving the Organization Via IT Transformation

To ensure the expert and the firm were aligned on the scope of the project, measurement of success, and expectations, the AE set up a call and included a Graphite Customer Success Manager to lead the conversation. The expert was expected to serve as the client stakeholders' primary point of contact in this engagement in addition to: 

  • Leading a team of 2-3 consultants
  • Presenting interim findings and key deliverables
  • Managing and facilitating working-level meetings
  • Supporting the professional development of junior team members

Once the expert and the firm signed off, they set up meetings with each IT service line. By engaging each service line, the expert identified opportunities to eliminate redundant capabilities and retire legacy systems with more robust cloud functionality. Likewise, the expert used the findings from these internal engagements to create strategies to improve the IT function's support of the overall federal government agency's mission. 

Part of devising the overarching strategy was understanding how specific areas of the IT function could be outsourced to other locations or agency providers. For eight months, the expert worked tirelessly to bring this transformation to fruition. 

In the end, not only was the expert able to help the firm meet its goal on time and within budget, but they were able to help the end client reach their objectives of reducing IT support costs, improving IT support level, and implementing an enterprise IT governance structure.