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Based in New York and serving clients globally, Fitzgerald Analytics helps clients make their high-stakes decisions more fact-based, more successful, and more profitable.

Operations and Technology - Client Success Stories

Technology, operations, and the teammates who use them well enable organizations to thrive. Their impact on strategic growth and organizational success can be transformational, unlocking growth, sustainability, and profit.

Yet achieving this potential can be challenging…for understandable reasons. The farther one moves from the “front-office perspective” towards the enabling technologies, processes and people of an organization, the harder it becomes to maintain “line of sight” between strategic priorities and the means of achieving them.

Our services enable clients to overcome these problems and to improve ROI on technology, operations and human-capital investments. Our trademarked methodologies emphasize transparency, enterprise-level perspective, and cross-functional alignment. Our “self-funding” projects pay for themselves quickly, delivering measurable results and profit impact (both cost savings and revenue enhancement).

Recent results for clients have included the following:

Improving Visibility into Organization Design and Operations

Problem: The Director of Strategy faced a situation of limited visibility (in terms of labor contributions, project responsibility, and sub-group performance levels) across the Service Organization, resulting in ambiguity around individual and group accountability and negative consequenes for customer service.

Goal: The FA team was hired to improve Director visibility across the Service Organization, and improve employee understanding of the impact of their work on the end of the value chain, the customer.

Approach:

GAP Analysis: Through a fast-cycle GAP Analysis, the FA team established a baseline for current employee productivity metrics and the impact of service processes on customer experience. The initial investigation concluded that although employees were responsive to maintaining performance metrics, they were not aware of the net impact at the end of the value chain: the customer.
Organic Brain-Storming: The FA team held multiple 'organic' brain-storming session with the brokerage management team by conducting a series of structured interviews with approximately 20 business unit leaders to gain a better understanding of how to realign the priority of projects to ensure better visibility across the Service Organization.

Result: The result was a clear-cut action plan highlighting the greatest opportunities for improvement within the Service Organization, with a clearly defined action plan to execute each solution to improve visibility across the board.

Information Technology Modernization Strategy and Planning

Problem: The client was relying on legacy information systems, which caused operational inefficiencies and prevented the company from growing and expanding into new markets. Over time, the operational problems also led to a stagnant “can’t do” culture within the IT department.

Goal: Fitzgerald Analytics was asked to develop and implement an IT strategy that would modernize the existing systems as well as expand the capabilities of the IT team.

Approach:

Current State Assessment: FA documented the legacy system and identified major IT-related pain points that impeded the client’s growth.
Opportunities for Improvement: FA identified specific components of the legacy system that need to be modernized in order to resolve those pain points, and listed high-level requirements and criteria that the modernized components must fulfill.
Overall Vision: FA developed and facilitated a well-defined process that allowed the client to generate hypotheses about which technology options would best fulfill the proposed requirements. Based on those hypotheses, potential vendors proposed system configurations that satisfy the client’s needs. One of those proposals was chosen as the preferred vision for the modernized system.
Implementation Plan: FA developed a plan to gradually transition the client’s IT systems to the modernized system. Implementation will begin with a pilot project that modernizes a relatively small but important component of the overall system, allowing for testing and refining of the technology hypotheses. The initial system will then grow by modernizing additional components, gradually moving more functionality off the legacy system. A service-oriented architecture will allow the modernized components to work together with remaining legacy components.

All work is being done in close collaboration with the client’s IT department. This approach was chosen in order to leverage the client’s knowledge of the legacy system and processes, and expand the IT department’s capabilities and transform its culture.

Result: The client has developed a clear vision for the modernized system and FA is currently in the process of helping the client create requirements for the initial pilot project. Thanks to clear goals and steady progress, the IT department’s culture and morale have undergone a major transformation and the IT team is able to take on a greater leadership role in the project. This project is in progress.

Operations Optimization and Lean Service Delivery Processes

Problem: Customer service processes at the client had grown organically over time but due to lack of standard operating procedures and coordination between different business units, they were poorly understood and documented. Management had limited visibility on how to tackle these issues to meet expanded client needs.

Goal: Fitzgerald Analytics was engaged to:

Establish formal, detailed maps of existing processes in order to identify both quick-hit and long term solutions to streamline operations within the organization.
Create business cases highlighting opportunities to optimize business operations while identifying metrics to monitor the impact of improvements implemented as a result of the project.

Approach:

Workshop Development: Fitzgerald Analytics led intensive workshops with over 50 client managers to create a consensus on the current state of the business process.
Framework for Success: Next, we will analyze current business processes to create a framework for how to systematically improve client operations, focusing on 'cutting out the fat' of the work flow.

Result: Project is currently in process, with expected savings of millions of dollars as a result of workflow optimization.

Technology Modernization and Change Management Initiative

Problem: The client wanted to migrate to a new technology platform, which required managing vendors, revisiting contracts, revising curricula, altering data processes and related systems, managing communications internally and externally, and retraining staff, teachers and students nationwide. Having never undertaken a large change management initiative such as this, the client felt overwhelmed by the challenges of the project.

Goal: Fitzgerald Analytics was asked to help the client with three aspects of this change:

Lead a cross-functional team to successfully launch the new platform across the nation, on a very tight timeframe that left little room for error.
Manage the various dimensions of change required within the organization to manage the new platform and all of its implications.
Build the client’s capabilities to effectively handle large change management projects in the future.

Approach: Fitzgerald Analytics applied its proprietary Managing for Results framework which is used to manage large scale cross-functional projects. The main facets of the process included:

Backwards Mapping: Working jointly with the client to define the vision and working backwards to identify a roadmap which would meet the goals of the modernization project.
Workshop Development: Holding a number of workshops in which senior management from the client was educated in best practices for large change management initiatives.
Implementation: Working with the client on achieving each of the milestones necessary in managing the transition to the new technology platform.

Result: The client successfully migrated to the new technology platform on time and within budget with over 16,000 high school students across the nation now using its new tools. In addition, the client has been able to use the techniques taught by the Fitzgerald Analytics team to analyze and report on progress based on the data generated by the tool. Finally, the client has undertaken another large change management project, which it is successfully implementing on its own using the skills and capabilities it learned during the project with Fitzgerald Analytics.

Institutionalizing IT Governance and Portfolio Management

Problem: The client found that its IT Department was not providing the strategic partnership and agile turn-around time on new initiatives needed to be competitive in global markets.

Goal: Fitzgerald Analytics was brought in to recommend ways to improve business and IT alignment, and to enforce standards processes and governance procedures which would make IT operations more efficient and visible to senior management.

Approach:

Standard Process Development: FA institutionalized standard processes for business-IT dialogue to ensure that IT initiatives were perfectly aligned with corporate goals.
Best Practices Training: FA ran training sessions for the IT team on best practices for managing the software development lifecycle.
Work Management: Finally, the FA team creating an IT Portfolio Management system which allowed the IT Department to prioritize and manage the work requests it received.

Result: The IT Department started operating at a much higher productivity level, while business
management felt it had clear communication lines and dialogue with the IT teams, making it easier to transform the business into one poised to take advantage of strategic opportunities.

Enterprise Knowledge Management

Problem: The client found that organizational knowledge was undocumented, stuck in silos and therefore inaccessible for use across the organization, resulting in operational inefficiencies and inability to effectively scale existing or develop new initiatives.

Goal: Fitzgerald Analytics was asked to help the client improve its ability to capitalize efficiently on existing and new business opportunities through the creation of streamlined processes and platforms for systematically storing, disseminating, and applying organizational knowledge.

Approach:

Training on Knowledge Management Best Practices: Fitzgerald Analytics conducted training sessions for the client on best practices in knowledge management so that they can continue to build their knowledge management capabilities as the organization grows.
Central Knowledge Database: FA created a central knowledge platform and taught the client how to structure and store information and knowledge on this platform, and how to make it easy for employees to access information and contribute towards it.
Incremental Roll-out Strategy: We helped the client develop an incremental approach to an enterprise roll-out by starting with two pilot projects which would act as proof-of-concept and training modules for the client, to gather, document and store their knowledge in a systematic manner.

Result: Two successful pilots have been started at the client, who is collaborating on best practices and lessons learned and will leverage their experiences in rolling out a full Enterprise Knowledge Management project later this year. Project is in progress.

Logistics and Operations Management

Problem: The client was working on redesigning the operational processes for managing a series of workshops it conducts for thousands of high school students at different sites throughout the US. During that work, the client team realized that, due to the complexity of the effort, they needed support in process optimization, and especially in managing the development of software to support the new processes.

Goal: In order to ensure that all the preconditions for a successful workshop series were in place, the client engaged Fitzgerald Analytics to coordinate the overall efforts of the team, and to take the lead in managing a vendor that customized a software package to support the new processes.

Approach:

Software Development Standards: Our team led the client in applying a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) management process to ensure that different stages of software development, from structure requirements to system implementation, were executed according to the strict deadline and client priorities.
Process Optimization: The team highlighted the necessary process maps, the system requirements, and worked with the key stakeholders to develop a system to successfully coordinate the flow of information between the different workshop groups and the head office.

Result: The revised processes supported substantial growth in the size of the community served, at a lower per capita cost than in previous years. The appropriate software was in place on time, and supported the coordination of a larger-than-ever student and volunteer population.