Diagnosing Systemic Challenges
Taking chaos at a Federal IT Program and turning it into mapped territory.
Services: Insight Discovery | End-User Observation & Listening | Operational & Cultural Alignment | Continuous Process Improvement
Challenge
Department leadership voiced a familiar frustration: despite talent, effort, and intention, the IT support program wasn’t delivering. The symptoms were everywhere—missed expectations, slow progress, and unclear accountability. But the root cause? That was harder to name. What surfaced from initial discovery included:
Poor prioritization and conflicting demands
Fragmented, cross-talking communication channels
Confusion over who owned what—and why
Low trust in decisions and the people making them
Manual processes weighed down by audit pressures and fear of failure
The deeper issue wasn’t individual underperformance—it was a system misaligned with itself.
Insights
The System was invisible
Decisions were being made in isolation. Work was constantly reprioritized, but no one had a full view of how change impacted the whole.
No shared map = no shared ownership
Without a visual model of how the work flowed—or stalled—there was no common ground to discuss what needed to change.
Mapping is meaning-making
By visualizing current workflows and decision points, we enabled stakeholders to name bottlenecks and co-design better governance.
Outcome
Visualized the program’s true “operating system” for the first time
Delivered a workflow-based decision support tool to clarify roles and reduce noise
Reframed misalignment as a system issue—not a people problem
“Innovation is what we needed. Fast innovation that we could demonstrate to our client is what we got.”
— Program Manager