MC2ConsultingBid.pdf

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

EXHIBIT C - 2 – BIDDER RESPONSE SHEET / 01620-BUSINESS CONSULTING SERVICES

Proposal

To

Business Consulting Services for Organizational Development, Change Management, and Management and Business Analysis

Competitive Solicitation No. 01620

January 24th, 2021

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CATEGORIES THAT YOUR COMPANY IS BIDDING ON

BIDDER’S ORGANIZATION

FINANCIAL STABILITY

PUBLIC-SECTOR FOCUS

STRONG CORE TEAM AND STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

AREAS OF SERVICE

CLIENT ROSTER

OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

SUMMARY

EXPERIENCE

PROJECT 1 – CHANGE MANAGEMENT FOR A CITY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) CONSOLIDATION PROJECT 2 – CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND PROCESS IMPROVEMENT FOR A COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM

MODERNIZATION

QUALITY ASSURANCE

QUALITY ASSURANCE APPROACH

STAFF QUALIFICATIONS

QUALIFICATIONS ESSAY

HOW WE MEET THE REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL’S MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

HOW OUR EXPERIENCE ENABLES US TO PERFORM HIGH QUALITY CHANGE MANAGEMENT SERVICES

COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI)

DEMONSTRATED COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI)

DEI DEVELOPMENT PLANS

SUMMARY

NOT TO EXCEED RATES (NTE)

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Categories that your company is bidding on

Check the box(s) next to each category that your company is bidding on:

Organizational Development Change Management Management and Business Analysis

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Bidder’s Organization

We have provided consulting services in support of Information Technology (IT) and business transformation projects within the public sector since our inception 13 years ago. We have in-depth experience and success leading public sector organizations through process improvement initiatives and facilitating change management for complex projects. Our consultants are seasoned professionals with many years of experience guiding government organizations through challenging technology and business process-related projects, helping them navigate through change.

Our experience allows us to be agile and have laser-sharp focus on delivering results. We have a 100% track record of managing projects to completion within budget and schedule, with high client satisfaction. Our strong quality management approach begins with defining clear, desired outcomes. We are certified as a Woman-Owned Business, Veteran-Owned Business, and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise in Washington; we are also a King County Small Contractor and Supplier.

Throughout this section, we highlight some of the key factors that demonstrate the capability, stability, and strength of our organization.

Financial Stability

Over our many years in business, our revenue and profit margins have remained stable and are steadily growing. Our cash flow is more than adequate, and we are debt free. We did not experience a slowdown due to the pandemic nor did we apply for federal or state aid. We are developing a business for the long term; one we believe will be around for many years to come. Ownership transitioned once since company formation; the current owner has been a partner for ten years and the owner for more than five. Because of our reputation for delivering value and providing high-quality services, many of our clients are referrals and return with more projects. For example, we have been working with a large city for the entire 13 years we have been in business, working with eight different departments on various projects.

Public-Sector Focus

We are committed to the public sector, serving state and local government, utilities, and higher education institutions in the Pacific Northwest. We have a long history of successful change management and process improvement projects in the public sector. The diverse range of agencies we have served include state, county, and city and involve most types of government services and functional areas. This diverse experience with government agencies will allow us to understand the environment of Washington State agencies and the issues they face.

Strong Core Team and Strategic Partnerships

Our experienced team of consultants are experts in transforming process and culture, with a long, successful track record serving the public sector. We staff each project thoughtfully based on the qualifications and expertise required, tailoring the team to best suit the unique needs of each client.

In addition to our core team of consultants that have been with us many years, we have a long list of qualified partners we call upon to augment our team as needed to increase the value and diversity we bring to our clients. Our partners provide specialized services including strategic planning; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); human resources; culture transformation; leadership coaching; IT strategic planning; and quality assurance.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Areas of Service

Change Management: We enable businesses to identify the impacts of changing their culture, processes, and technology and achieve their desired results by managing the people side of the change.

We collaborate with our clients to tailor a change management approach suited to their unique needs and environment. We guide organizations through each phase of their transition, from the current to the future state. We start by engaging stakeholders to clearly articulate a vision of the change and enable successful adoption through change management activities including communication, stakeholder engagement, training, and coaching. We utilize the Prosci ADKAR Model as a framework to develop our change management plans. Our own change methodology, the 5 Es: Envision, Engage, Enable, Execute, Evaluate, helps organize and focus the work. We facilitate the execution of change management plans through implementation, working with all levels of the organization. Executive sponsors are coached and supported to work together as a coalition, championing change throughout the organization. Teams are coached and supported through the five building blocks of change:

Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. We believe reinforcement is often the most overlooked yet most important element of change management, allowing changes to be sustained. We coach our clients to create reinforcement plans including recognition, measurement, and evaluation.

Process Improvement: We guide government agencies to systematically improve processes to achieve their strategic improvement goals. We utilize Lean, a proven system for continuous improvement, to facilitate our clients through documentation, analysis, and redesign of their processes to provide the greatest value to their customers with the least amount of waste. Through research and benchmarking, we help clients align their business processes with industry standards and best practices. We also include equity analysis to advance equity for employees and customers. One of the principles of Lean is “Respect for People”— in every engagement, we involve of all levels of the organization to collaboratively cocreate their future processes. This involvement and collaboration create the buy-in needed for changes to stick, leading to lasting improvements. All our engagements are designed with inclusion as a critical success factor, and we are always sensitive to accommodation needs of the diverse groups of people we work with.

Quality Assurance Services: We guide government agencies to build quality assurance into their projects from the beginning, defining what quality means to them and establishing structured monitoring and accountability mechanisms to continually evaluate and improve quality. Thinking proactively about quality prevents mistakes and problems, leading to more effective and efficient outcomes. We help set up quality assurance plans and programs as projects are initiated, then we monitor and report on progress throughout the project lifecycle, culminating with a lessons learned assessment to be utilized for future projects. This delivers ongoing value to our clients after project completion.

Strategic Planning: We facilitate government agencies to create missions, visions, and values that guide their organizations toward a brighter future and enable them to better meet the needs of their constituents and adapt to change. We guide our clients to collaboratively develop their vision and values involving all levels of the organization, creating ownership. From employee focus groups to executive retreats, we have tools and approaches to enable tapping into the inherent creativity within an organization. We coach our clients to develop supporting goals and action plans based on mission, vision, and values. We believe a strategic plan does not provide value unless there is an actionable plan with assigned responsibility for following through.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Client Roster

Our client roster is made up of a variety of public institutions in the Pacific Northwest. The table below includes clients by type with services we have provided, duration we have worked with them, and whether we have current, active projects with them.

Client Roster

Areas of Service Duration and Activity

Change Management

Business Process Improvement

Quality Assurance Services

Project Duration

Project Status

Conservation Agency (State) X X 10 mos. Complete

Community College 1 X X 3 yrs. Active Community College 2 X X 15 mos. Active Community College 3 X X 1 yr. Active Community College 4 X X 2 mos. Active Community College 5 X 10 mos. Active Libraries (State) X 6 mos. Complete Dept. of Revenue (State) X X 7 mos. Complete

Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (State) X X 1 mo. Active

Human Services Dept. (Municipality) X X 4 yrs. Complete

Dept. of Finance and Admin. Services (Municipality)

X X 4 yrs. Complete

Dept. of Information Tech. (Municipality) X X 3 yrs. Complete

Police Dept.

(Municipality) X X 2 yrs. Complete

Electrical Dept.

(Municipality) X X 8 yrs. Complete

Public Utilities (Municipality) X X 10 yrs. Complete

Dept. of Construction and Inspections (Municipality)

X X 2 yrs. Complete

Dept. of Transportation (Municipality)

X X 6 yrs. Complete

Office of Management and Finance (Municipality)

X X 6 mos. Complete

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Office of Community and Civic Life (Municipality)

X X 6 mos. Complete

Dept. of Revenue (Municipality) X 15 mos. Active

Facilities Management (Municipality)

X 1 yr. Complete

Parks Dept.

(Municipality) X 6 mos. Complete

Human Resources (Municipality) X 2 mos. Active

Consumer Direct Employer of Long- Term Caregivers (State)

X 2 mos. Active

Our Guiding Principles

We share common values as a team that permeate everything we do and allow us to provide the highest value to our clients:

• Client First: We are committed to putting client interests first, focusing on how we can best help them meet their goals.

• Partnership: We partner with our clients because when change is embraced, ownership is established, and lasting results are created.

• Collaboration: We collaborate within our team and with client team members; by working together, we achieve stronger results.

• Inclusivity: We are inclusive in our approach, valuing diversity in our employees and clients.

• Clear Communication: We create an environment of open, honest, clear communication, ensuring that everyone understands and is understood.

• Transferred Knowledge: We transfer knowledge to our clients so they are equipped with actionable solutions that they can use and build on for years to come.

• Adaptability: We are open-minded and adaptable to client and project needs, enabling the right mix of tried-and-true methodology and innovative, customized solutions.

Summary

We are a leading government consulting firm in Washington with a wealth of experience providing change management and process improvement to many state, county, and city entities. Our business has proven to be financially stable over our entire history and has been steadily growing. Most of our business comes from repeat clients and referrals due to our high client satisfaction. We are known for taking on the most challenging projects, often spanning multiple years. We have a track record of delivering change management projects on time and within budget, delivering high-value results. Our team includes highly qualified and experienced consultants with focused expertise in leading change management and process improvement in the public sector. Our experience, expertise, and drive for excellence will pave our way to success with any future work performed under this Master Contract.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Experience

Project 1 – Change Management for a City Information Technology (IT) Consolidation

Size, Scope, and Timeline

A city’s new IT department was created to consolidate more than 650 IT employees from 12 departments (“source departments”) into a single, city-wide team. The consolidation was planned and implemented in less than a year. We were engaged to plan and manage the organizational change management (OCM) element of the consolidation process, including the stabilization period after the new department was created.

Goals

• Develop and execute an OCM strategy and plan to ease the transition for employees being consolidated and their former departments.

• Integrate and standardize the various IT services based on best practices to ensure seamless transition for source departments with varying service-level requirements.

• Design and implement best practice Human Resources (HR) and finance processes for the new IT department.

• Create a shared vision and values for the culture of the new department.

• Manage staff and customer resistance; increase buy-in and confidence in a successful implementation.

Actions Taken

Overview: We developed and executed a change management plan to address the needs and concerns of IT staff in source departments, including but not limited to police, fire, transportation, permitting, facilities, finance, parks, and utilities. This involved a comprehensive change management approach to assess the current state, develop an understanding of department needs, and work collaboratively with all stakeholders to define the ideal state. We engaged representative staff from all levels of the impacted departments throughout the change process to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration for transition planning and development of standardized service delivery models.

We engaged executives from within each source department to solidify the relationships between those departments and IT. There was significant resistance as the departments were used to controlling their own IT resources for many years. We assessed the resistance and created interventions to reassure departments their service levels would be maintained and helped them see the value of the consolidation for their respective departments.

To ensure success in this effort, we followed the tenets of our 5 Es change model to manage the comprehensive change necessary to build the new department. The following are our 5 Es:

• Envision: We guide organizations to envision the future state together.

• Engage: We engage stakeholders within every level of the organization and externally.

• Enable: We enable stakeholders through communication, training, and other change management activities.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

• Execute: We execute the change effectively by creating a clear plan for the transition and supporting users through it.

• Evaluate: We evaluate and adjust results based on change management metrics.

Communications Strategy and Execution: Working with executive leadership, we developed key messages to repeat throughout the project at specific milestones, customized approaches for communicating with different stakeholder groups, and ideas for injecting meaningful and fun communications throughout the project. We planned and facilitated town hall sessions, worked with communications staff to develop newsletter items and Staff Spotlight interest pieces to introduce IT staff to one another, and shared milestone updates with stakeholders.

Facilitation of Transition Teams: Our consultants led workshops that engaged stakeholders in structured discussions around relevant issues and generated actionable solutions to critical concerns.

Workshops had a regular cadence and were clustered around specific operational areas necessary to build the infrastructure of the new department, such as HR, finance, culture, and values. Teams consisted of diverse, active, and engaged members at various organization levels and represented different source departments. The HR transition team identified and resolved issues such as how source departments and the new IT department would collaborate on hiring key IT staff. The finance transition team comprised of budget and finance leaders from across the City resolved issues such as how the process for capitalizing IT projects funded from multiple sources would work.

The culture and values transition team identified culture mismatches among the various source departments. We facilitated efforts with the cross-departmental team to identify the values and cultural elements that unite and inspire staff in the new department, as well as cultural elements they wanted to leave behind. The team used input from over 100 IT staff members to develop values that would work for employees merging into the new department. This highly interactive and structured process created a cultural foundation for the new department that responded to the needs and desires of its workforce.

Facilitation of Service Design Teams: We facilitated service design teams for all IT services. Those teams included representatives from each source department. The teams worked collaboratively to develop models and methods for delivering services that would maintain or exceed IT service levels for all departments within the City. We also facilitated the teams to define roles for the consolidated organizations and standardized processes based on best practices.

Results

• Over 650 employees from a dozen different departments were successfully consolidated into one centralized department without any layoffs or significant turnover of staff.

• Staff merging from disparate departments agreed on standardized processes and service-level agreements (SLAs) that met the needs of their customers, creating ownership and a collaborative environment.

• The employee-inspired, employee-created values were accepted by executive leadership, HR, and employees, allowing them to set the direction for development of the new department’s culture.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Project 2 – Change Management and Process Improvement for a Community College System Modernization

Size, Scope, and Timeline

We partnered with a community college for three years to prepare for transition from a 35-year-old administrative system to a new, more modern system. This project was part of a larger one to standardize systems across 30-plus colleges. The new system resulted in complete changes to processes for all college employees and a major change to how students interact with the college. Our scope included current state process documentation and analysis, Lean sprocess improvement analysis, future state process design, and the development of change management plans to support transition to the new system. Our team engaged with over 80 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from all organization levels to document over 300 current processes, develop over 100 future state process maps, and create change action plans across all processes.

Goals

• Document existing processes (current state).

• Develop processes that will work with the new system (future state).

• Build ownership of future state processes amongst employees.

• Identify changes from current state to future state and analyze impacts on stakeholders.

• Create plans for supporting users and external stakeholders in adjusting to changes.

Actions Taken

Overview: We guided the college to prepare and execute a strategy to understand and plan for business process change. We coached project leadership to structure the project, identifying 35 cross-functional process teams. We created a comprehensive methodology to lead each team through documentation and analysis of current state processes, development of future state processes, and planning for key changes. Our methodology was highly effective for in-person meetings. COVID-19 created circumstances that required us to adjust to an all-virtual environment towards the project’s end, and we were able to create a modified process equally effective at engaging teams and surfacing improvement opportunities.

We partnered with the college teams to complete the process and change management work over a three-year period. As a result of our success with preparing the college’s teams for the transition, we were selected by four other colleges to provide similar change management services for their implementations. We are still working with these colleges.

Current State Process Documentation: We facilitated workshops with teams of SMEs in 35 different cross-functional process groups from across the college to map their current state processes. We documented the results of these workshops with swim-lane process maps and accompanying process narratives that included details such as inputs/outputs, roles, technology interfaces, and key assumptions. This documentation provided the college a baseline from which to develop new and more efficient processes.

Our process mapping clearly highlighted process and system dependencies made it easy for teams to identify inefficiencies. The cross-functional team facilitation created ownership of work processes and built a deeper understanding of the downstream effects of each process. We often saw lightbulbs going

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents off for the team members in our sessions as they realized how the processes all come together, as most had only been previously aware of immediate steps within their areas. Our documentation was clear and easy to follow as a result of our best-practice standard for process maps. Throughout the project, we were able to continually refer to the process maps as we worked with the teams on other activities, such as future state process development, which helped teams easily re-engage with the material and quickly make connections.

Future State Process Development: We facilitated cross-functional teams from all levels of the organization to develop over 100 future state processes in a series of workshops with each team. In the first workshop, we guided the teams to analyze their current state processes, comparing them to the best practice, standard processes that were developed collaboratively by all the colleges (common processes). We also compared roles from current state to common processes, identifying where adjustments needed to be made to the college’s current roles to adapt to the new system, and we reviewed technology systems used in the current state to determine whether these systems would be replaced or remain to be used in the future state with the new system.

After completing the comparison of current to common processes, we facilitated the teams through an analysis of their current processes to identify opportunities for improvement. For each team, we started with identifying success criteria for the process and stakeholders. We then facilitated the teams to identify pain points of their current processes, asking probing questions through a Lean lens and an equity lens. For each pain point, we led the teams to brainstorm root causes and potential solutions. In follow-up workshops, we collaborated with teams to map the future state processes based on insights from the analysis sessions and refined the list of changes from current to future state. We then completed documentation and followed up with the teams to review and validate the maps.

Change Impact Analysis and Action Planning: During future state process development, we identified changes from current state to future state. For each change, we guided the teams to assess overall impact on stakeholders and identify challenges they needed to plan for. For each change impact, we created targeted action plans including college-specific training, procedures, job aids, role changes, stakeholder communication plans, or policy changes. We facilitated teams to identify owners and establish deadlines for completion of each action.

Communication and Change Management Planning: Throughout the project, we coached the project sponsor and change manager to develop transparent and inclusive communications for employees and external stakeholders on the project, creating awareness and buy-in. We facilitated periodic update meetings with all staff to review the project status and recognize team members for their efforts. We created an interactive trivia game for updates that helped staff learn about the project in a fun and rewarding way. We facilitated a communication planning process with the communications lead and change manager to create targeted plans for communicating with stakeholder groups.

Results

• College staff developed confidence and buy-in regarding how their new processes would work upon transition to the new system.

• Many improvement opportunities were identified, with some implemented prior to transition.

• Change action plans were developed to support staff, faculty, and students through the transition with training, procedures, job aids, communications, and policies.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance Approach

We know our work quality is paramount to meeting client expectations and maintaining our stellar reputation. We apply a consistent Quality Assurance (QA) approach that includes the following key elements:

Staff Assignment: Assigning appropriate staff is key to the success of any project. We evaluate project needs and identify our staff or partners best suited to deliver high-quality results. We only assign highly-experienced staff who have previously done the type of work required by a project.

Our staff is experienced, flexible, and able to work well independently and as part of a team.

Expectation and Goal Setting: Quality begins and ends with the Voice of the Customer. At the start of each project, we hold a work session with our clients to fully understand their expectations and identify project goals to ensure we have a clear vision for the project. These conversations surface both the explicit and implicit desired outcomes our clients have.

Evaluation: Based on the goals set at the start of the engagement, we identify desired outcomes and set accountability measurements to periodically evaluate how well we are meeting them.

Adjustments are made as needed to ensure the engagement’s success.

Deliverable Review: We hold all our staff to high standards when it comes to developing deliverables. We have documented standards and templates for deliverables and require review of all deliverables by a second consultant before we submit them to a client, ensuring overall quality and that it meets requirements as defined by the project scope.

Status Reporting and Client Check-Ins: We work closely with clients to communicate progress and monitor client satisfaction. Our quality assurance approach includes timely status reporting. Our team prepares and presents, at minimum, monthly status reports for all projects. Each monthly report summarizes accomplishments, articulates next steps, and identifies high-priority risks. We review each status report with our clients and check in on how we are meeting expectations.

Project Management Standards: Our project management approach follows Project Management Institute (PMI) standards and includes foundational elements to manage quality, schedule, budget, resources, scope, and risks. We strive to proactively identify and resolve issues before they become problems. We believe issues should be identified and resolved at the point closest to origin and will escalate to our project sponsor in a timely, professional manner as necessary. We identify potential risks to successful completion of our work, mitigation options, and who has responsibility for corrective action.

We also offer the option to add services of an external QA consulting firm for additional quality assurance support on our large, complex contracts. On these engagements, our QA consultant will review all major deliverables and meet with the client teams monthly to review significant issues and risks. This firm has provided independent quality assurance services on a wide range of government and private entity projects for over 25 years. Their clients include states, cities, counties, and a variety of special districts.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Staff Qualifications

We include details in this section regarding our team’s education, training, and areas of expertise. 86% of our team members have master’s degrees, and the following is a collective list of our education, certifications, and training:

Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees: MBA; MBA Operations Management; MA Organizational Systems;

MA Social Work Administration; MBA Quantitative Analysis; BS Industrial Engineering;

BA Economics; BA Sociology, Social Justice and Corrections; BA Psychology;

BS Accounting, Computer Science; BS Marketing; BS Business Administration;

BS Anthropology, Archaeology.

Certifications and Training: Six Sigma Black Belt (ASQ); Prosci Change Practitioner;

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt; Creative Learning’s Benchmarks 360 Assessment Tool;

Quality Improvement; Trained Mediator; Certified Management Consultant (CMC);

Certified Ethics Professional; Project Management Professional; Chemistry for Conservators.

Our primary areas of expertise are listed below in addition to years of experience for each consultant:

Areas of Expertise and Years of Experience Principal C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 External

QA

Change Management 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 18 yrs. 6 yrs. 25 yrs. 15 yrs. 25 yrs.

Process Improvement 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 36 yrs. 6 yrs. 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 30 yrs.

Quality Assurance 30 yrs. 21 yrs. 15 yrs. 5 yrs. 30 yrs.

Strategic Planning and Visioning 20 yrs. 18 yrs. 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 25 yrs.

Facilitation 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 36 yrs. 6 yrs. 30 yrs. 15 yrs. 25 yrs.

Government Services 30 yrs. 8 yrs. 28 yrs. 14 yrs. 30 yrs. 3 yrs. 30 yrs.

Information Technology Planning 30 yrs. 6 yrs. 35 yrs. 2 yrs. 30 yrs.

Stakeholder Engagement 30 yrs. 28 yrs. 14 yrs. 35 yrs. 15 yrs. 30 yrs.

We provide brief biographies for our core team of consultants to further illustrate and expand on our education, training, experience, and areas of expertise:

Principal: Our principal is a thought leader and strategic thinker with more than 30 years’ experience guiding organizations to breakthrough results in the public and private sector. As a certified Six Sigma Black Belt (ASQ) and Prosci Change Management practitioner, she is skilled at analyzing what is working and what is not in an organization and orchestrating positive change. She has led over 100 highly-successful consulting engagements. Her recent clients include government agencies throughout the Pacific Northwest. She has led change management and process improvement initiatives at a wide range

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents of agencies including transportation, utilities, human services, permitting, revenue, customer service, finance, administrative services, and emergency services. She is a highly-skilled process improvement facilitator with many years of experience working with teams to redesign their processes for better outcomes. She has been with our company for over 11 years and has owned it for five. She has an MBA in Operations Management from UCLA and a BS in Industrial Engineering.

Consultant 1 (C1): Consultant 1 brings over 15 years’ experience managing complex projects, analyzing strategic and tactical objectives, implementing improved business processes, leading teams, and developing people. She helps organizations manage change in processes and systems to ensure project success. She specializes in business process improvement, change management, and training development for integrated software implementations. She has extensive experience in designing training, creating training plans, and development and delivery of training, both in-person and remotely.

She recently led training development and delivery at a city department of transportation in support of their permitting software implementation projects. Other recent clients include a community college and human services department. A highly-motivated team member, Consultant 1 has a master’s degree in business administration and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. She is currently leading process improvement and change management for two community college system implementations.

Consultant 2 (C2): Consultant 2 has over 36 years’ experience in the field of health and human services and has worked in health systems, nonprofit organizations, and county and state governments. In addition to her work on our team, she was recently a chief operating officer and director of county human services. In these roles, she led teams to successfully implement major change efforts, including leading emergency operations; operations during a department-wide workforce equity strategic plan;

three human resource equity initiatives; change management related to adopting a performance management framework approach to budgeting processes; and change management efforts focused on facilitating a county’s transformation to a new culture of safety, trust, and belonging. In addition, she has led teams in risk mitigation efforts utilizing continuous quality improvement methods and mediation techniques. She has a Master of Arts in Social Work Administration and is a Certified Prosci Change Practitioner. She is currently developing change management plans for multiple system and business projects.

Consultant 3 (C3): Consultant 3 has over six years’ specialization in organizational change management, process improvement, and stakeholder engagement for large state and local government organizations, including libraries, social services, and information technology projects. She leads cross-functional teams to ensure the people side of change is well-supported for a variety of organizational changes, such as system implementations, consolidations and reorganizations, process and policy changes, and changes in service offerings. Consultant 3 adjusts her approach and methodology to fit the needs and culture of the organization, the size and scope of the change, and the context of the change. She facilitates engaging workshops and meetings, both in-person and virtually, including process mapping, planning sessions, strategizing communications, and many other collaborative activities involved in organizational change management. Consultant 3 uses a mix of conventional and unconventional methods for team development, problem-solving, maximizing collaboration, and creative solution development. She has a Master of Arts in Organizational Systems: Leadership and Organizational Development, a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. She is currently leading change management for a state agency system implementation.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Consultant 4 (C4): Consultant 4 has over 35 years’ experience in a broad array of industries and disciplines including state and local government. She is a creative, innovative executive with proven expertise in management consulting, strategic planning, technology, quality assurance, and organizational culture change. She combines strong planning, organizational development, and communication skills with exceptional political savvy and the ability to work collaboratively in extremely fast-paced environments. Consultant 4 works effectively with executives, managers, and staff at all levels and brings a practical, operational perspective of change management. She has led large organizational change as an executive, overseeing complex department-level reorganizations, leading a wholesale transition of a local government to a new, cloud-based Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) system, and leading change management on many other large, complex projects. She has a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Computer Science, has attended MBA courses, and is certified in the Center for Creative Learning Benchmarks 360 assessment tool. She is currently providing quality assurance services for a city’s tax system implementation.

Consultant 5 (C5): Consultant 5 brings several years of recent experience in local government and a track record of leading projects on time and on budget. She is trained in organizational change management, project management, and product management, and she has a passion for helping government agencies manage through change. She is adept at mapping business processes, leading change action planning discussions, and drafting communication plans, which she has applied to government projects. Examples include leading change management and process improvement for three state colleges and helping a city’s retirement group prepare for launch of a self-service member portal. Consultant 5 brings 15 years’ experience as a manager in banking, where she focused on developing and implementing strategic initiatives to grow product lines and make processes more efficient. She excelled at leading banks through numerous mergers/acquisitions involving change management, staff training, communicating changes to customers, and leading policy/procedure documentation. She has an MBA and is Prosci-certified and PMP-certified. She is also a member of the ACMP Pacific Northwest Chapter and the PMI – Puget Sound Chapter.

External QA: Our external QA holds an MBA in Quantitative Analysis and is a Certified Management Consultant with over 30 years’ experience in information systems planning, design, development, implementation, change management, training, and project quality assurance. He has extensive experience in business process reengineering, information systems strategic planning, and information technology management. He has served as the lead quality assurance consultant on numerous implementation projects for cities, counties, states, and school districts. He was previously a principal in an international accounting and consulting firm.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

Qualifications Essay

How We Meet the Request for Proposal’s Minimum Qualifications

Principal’s Experience

Our company owner has an MBA in Operations Management from UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Oregon State University. She has been focused on change management and process improvement for her entire career of over 30 years, 27 of them as a professional management consultant and the last 17 almost exclusively consulting with state and local government agencies. She is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt and has multiple change management certifications including Prosci Change Practitioner. She started her career in the US Air Force where she was certified as a Total Quality Management (TQM) facilitator and studied under continuous improvement experts including W.

Edwards Deming and Genichi Taguchi. After the Air Force, she served as an internal consultant for Hughes Aircraft, where she led process improvement projects and taught classes in continuous process improvement, statistical process control, quality function deployment, and design of experiments. She started her career as a professional consultant with Ernst & Young and IBM, completing extensive additional training and earning certifications in process improvement and change management.

Throughout her career, she has continually updated this training through professional development and training in Lean and change management. Additionally, she is currently hosting an online virtual learning community for process improvement professionals to discuss strategies for facilitating process improvement in a remote environment. She has been with the company for eleven years and the owner for over five.

Experience in Change Management

We have 13 years of experience in providing change management services, primarily in the public sector. We have coached numerous public agencies through transforming their processes, systems, and organizational cultures to achieve their strategic goals. Depending on the project, our change management work is in support of a system replacement or is part of an organizational or process improvement initiative. Regardless of what initiates the change, we have been successful in helping our clients navigate impacts to their policies, organization structures, business processes, and information systems.

Sample engagements demonstrating our diverse change management experience, which we will draw upon to serve Washington State agencies, are included in this section. All these engagements involved members of our existing team, and we have incorporated lessons learned from each of these engagements to refine our methodology.

Organizational Change Management for a Revenue Department Within a State Agency: A state agency initiated Organizational Change Management (OCM) activities for their unclaimed property system replacement project. The unclaimed property system directly impacts over 30 agency employees, more than 60,000 holders of unclaimed property, and countless prospective claimants of unclaimed property.

As the selected OCM consultants, we performed a baseline assessment of the current project status and already-existing OCM activities. With the baseline assessment in mind, we developed an OCM plan, formed an OCM leadership team, and launched an OCM team to ensure bi-directional communication and informal readiness monitoring.

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents

We are working closely with the project director and project manager to better integrate OCM into their regular project activities and into the fabric of the agency. Our efforts have included coaching sessions with sponsors and internal OCM resources to ensure knowledge-transfer and experiential learning opportunities to enhance their current skillset and solidify OCM concepts. We take intermittent “pulse checks” to assess progress in both readiness for the system implementation as well as participant comfort with OCM. Both continue to increase as we progress. We continue to work with them to ensure they are ready for the system go-live date in April 2021 and can put their new OCM skills into practice on future projects.

Salmon Recovery Funding Lean Study for a State Agency: A state’s conservation-focused agency initiated a project to redesign their salmon recovery grant funding process to improve efficiency, standardize processes across geographies, and streamline the process to secure funding for salmon recovery in a short amount of time. As the selected consultant, we led a team-based study of the process, policies, organization, and systems. The study was multifaceted, including data analysis, extensive stakeholder outreach, process workshops, and benchmarking. We facilitated teams to document and analyze processes, identify issues, identify the root cause of the issues, and develop policy, organizational, and system recommendations. The redesigned process and recommendations address core issues raised by the customers of the process – the project applicants – around having a more streamlined, less time-consuming process with fewer iterations of the application.

Change Management and Process Redesign for Multiple Community and Technical Colleges as Part of an Enterprise System Implementation: A large group of community and technical colleges within a state is undergoing a major undertaking, replacing all their legacy systems to create one common, integrated set of services for all the colleges working together. The new system is a single, centralized system for students, faculty, and staff that will streamline and standardize practices. It will transform most of the business processes within each college and how they interact with students and other external stakeholders. The change all these stakeholders will experience is profound and deep, and we have guided four of these colleges through change management and process improvement.

For the first college (Community College 1) that we helped prepare for implementation, we completed comprehensive documentation of 285 business processes and facilitated the development of over 100 future state processes. We supported them through change management planning, facilitated identification of the changes from current to future state, and identified the key actions to support staff and stakeholders through the transition from a people, process, and organization perspective.

Our change management work was so successful that this college recommended us to other colleges in future deployment groups. We continue to work with three other colleges, assisting with process improvement and change management in support of their system implementations. At Community College 3, we developed an OCM plan and have been facilitating a college-wide change management task force that is supporting external and internal stakeholders through the transition. We have continued all this work remotely throughout the pandemic.

Strategic Planning for a City’s and County’s Customer Service: A city hired our company to assess its current customer service centers and develop a strategic plan for implementing 311, including a partnership with the County the City resides in. We facilitated development of a joint vision for customer service with City and County executives in a series of off-sites. To assess the City’s current service and identify strategic improvement opportunities, we interviewed 16 contact centers across the City within multiple departments, collecting data on FTEs, cost, service levels, and improvement

Bidder Name: Chakoian McClure Group Inc., dba MC2 Consulting. Included: Title Page, Table of Contents opportunities. We also conducted benchmarking with 5 other cities that implemented 311 programs.

The information was compared and analyzed to identify city-wide opportunities to improve customer service and recommendations for the 311 implementation, including integration of change management. We prepared a final report which was presented to City Council. The report was well received, and implementation is underway.

Information Technology (IT) Consolidation Organizational Change Management: A city contracted with us to provide OCM when it decided to consolidate its hundreds of IT employees distributed across a dozen different departments into one new IT department. This project had been attempted numerous times before, and there was a high degree of resistance across the City’s departments. The consolidation needed to be planned and managed in a way that would not impact service levels to the departments.

Our change management approach included a high degree of engagement and partnership with departments to design processes, organization, services, and culture. Our work consisted of standardizing and optimizing financial, human resources, and IT service processes, as well as managing the deep cultural changes necessary to create a single, new department with consistent values. We led a culture and values team to evaluate the cultures of the departments and created a vision for culture and values for the new, consolidated department.

We led service design teams to integrate and standardize services, evaluating the best practices of each department, and we managed transition teams for human resources and financial processes. We managed the entire communication process, which included town hall meetings with all employees and a monthly newsletter. Resistance to change for this effort was significant from the executive level to front-line staff, and it involved unions. We guided executives and change management team members in the new department to proactively manage this resistance.

Change Management and Process Improvement for a Transportation Department’s Permitting System Implementation Project: We led change management and process design for a major upgrade of a city department of transportation’s permitting system that resulted in major changes to business processes.

The project also created the capability for the public to access all permitting and licensing applications through a single online portal. Throughout this multi-year project, we mapped current processes, analyzed current state processes, developed future state processes, and identified requirements. This effort helped the city’s department of transportation improve processes that allowed them to provide better customer service and helped staff better transition to the change.

In preparation for implementation, we created business procedures and job aids and developed and delivered…