The Challenge:
On April 12, 2017, the Office of Management and Budget issued Memorandum M-17-22, the “Comprehensive Plan for Reforming the Federal Government and Reducing the Federal Civilian Workforce.” Based on this memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of the Chief Management Officer was directed to lead the business reform agenda across DoD. This included identifying overlapping and outdated programs, instilling budget discipline and effective resource management, streamlining the requirements and acquisition processes, and improving the quality and productivity of business operations throughout the Department.
The Approach:
Identifying cost savings and reforming business operations at this scale is a significant undertaking. It requires extensive functional expertise, analysis, planning, and collaboration throughout the enterprise to ensure implementation of the most impactful reforms. In collaboration with DoD’s IT and Business Systems Reform Team, the Nakupuna Companies began identifying an array of reform areas aimed at transforming how DoD delivers secure, stable, and resilient IT capabilities. The Nakupuna Companies also provided program management support to include the identification, prioritization, and execution of reform initiatives. This involved working with stakeholders across the Office of the Secretary of Defense and DoD to perform cost analysis and assessment, create courses of action recommendations, develop implementation and change management plans, and track and report program performance.
The Results:
The Nakupuna Companies helped identify and capture efficiencies via the successful execution of numerous initiatives. Our support translated into a partnership between DoD and the Office of Personnel Management’s USALearning assisted acquisition capability to help the Department acquire training and education related goods and services more efficiently and cost effectively, saving them more than $120M over the next five years. This agreement will also enable the development of a Common Course Catalog and Common Learning Record Repository for DoD, streamlining the Department’s training ecosystem.
Our support also helped modernize the DoD Civilian Human Resource Management System and its capabilities, revamping an outdated process and improving how taxpayer resources are used. This translated into an improved safeguard for personnel data with credible cyber protections, the establishment of common authoritative human resources data sources, and an overall reduction in operational complexity. When combined, these process improvements reduced the number of manual transactions by 40 percent and created a cost savings opportunity of nearly $150M over the next five years.
The Nakupuna Companies helped DoD Executive Agent with the implementation of a Reform Management Group decision to consolidate the Department’s numerous task management systems into a single solution. Our support included financial analysis of the implementation and programmatic costs as well as the options to transition users to the system. A pilot program conducted by the Army demonstrated this reform will save the Department a significant number of labor hours annually and improve the response rate for taskers.