The Challenge:
An Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) of a Bureau within a larger Agency needed real-time insight for their spending on new projects as well as funding of ongoing projects. Their goal of keeping their spend within their approved budget seems obvious (right?) but some of the information they need is in the agency financial management system and contract writing system where they had very limited access. Additionally, there is project management information distributed in spreadsheets, email and shared drive.
This office does not have view of all upcoming purchases, so it hampers their ability to prioritize spend. They also need to associate contract actions and their statuses with line items on their spend plan. Their Contracting Officer Representatives (CORs) managing labor contracts cannot easily track burn rates to ensure the contractors do not over-burn for the obligation. Due to poor record management from previous management, this OCIO lacks the historical purchase data to effectively plan the cost and timing of software license renewals.
Their triage for this spend planning crisis is to use a spreadsheet to capture upcoming needs with estimated costs and to track obligations of ongoing projects and purchases. They are making funding decisions in the absence of real-time data on their financial position. Kind of scary situation – like walking blind-folded in the general area of a cliff where your allocated budget drops off.
The Ask:
When giving this OCIO a demo of our Facilitated Intelligent Needs Development® (FIND) app for Program Managers’ acquisition planning and Contractor Performance Intelligence® (CPI) app for contractor performance management, they asked if we could modify the apps to help them with their spend planning challenge.
The Solution:
We proposed a pilot with this office to use our two software products, FIND for spend planning of new projects/needs and CPI for spend planning and post-award performance management of ongoing projects/contracts/purchases.
SSC would tailor FIND and CPI to address the spend planning needs of their office to include:
The Pilot:
Our pilot kicked off the end of April 2022. Together we have been performing business analysis and validating customer needs during May 2022. In June 2022, we moved into iterative design and development. It is so fun to show them how much easier, cleaner, more accurate their spend planning could be. This bureau has such an important mission so we are happy to help them organize their spend planning so they can concentrate on their mission. We will keep you posted.
If you want to learn more about FIND and CPI, please watch our videos on this website and request a demo at demo@
Check out our video that provides an overview of FIND and CPI. Or better yet, request a demo at demo@seventhsenseconsulting.com or contact me at (301) 392-1895 or lakers@seventhsenseconsulting.com.
Make it an enlightened day,
Lisa Akers
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SSC’s FIND is a software product designed to support the requiring offices in developing requirements, market research, acquisition planning and PR package assembly.
SSC’s CPI software product supports post-award contractor performance management from post-award kick-off to contract closeout and includes invoice tracking for spend management at the contract, period and CLIN level.