We're Your Mission Support Partners.

Our agile, leadership & team-building expertise will help you meet agency objectives.

Core Competencies

Agile & Product Delivery Coaching

Focusing on people, processes, products, and technology, our coaches will work with your government agency to drive innovative products and enterprise solutions in support of your mission.

  • Agile & product delivery coaching at the team, program, portfolio, and enterprise-level 
  • Build and support all phases of a product-centric, value delivery organization: agency program and product structuring, human centered design, customer discovery, prototyping, minimal viable product (MVP), design as a service, road mapping, story mapping, gap analysis, prioritization, work estimation, backlog grooming, sprint planning, and standup facilitation
  • Agile Lifecycle Management tool configuration and administration
  • Map government regulations and compliance with agile methodologies and practices
  • Support development of an agency operating model and agile playbook, aligning agency policies to agile delivery process and practices 
  • Agility assessments, tailored adoption strategies, and agile pilot programs
  • Generate leading indicators and agility performance metrics creating visibility and traceability to improvement objectives
  • Facilitate tailored adoption strategies through agile pilot programs, program kick-offs, delivery team onboarding, process re-engineering, program increment planning, release planning, sprint planning, portfolio kanban, cross-functional decision-making, communication strategies 
  • Institute technical delivery practices: DevSecOps, modernization of delivery stacks, enterprise-wide software application and database development support, architecture, cloud, business intelligence, solutions software delivery, digitization, modernization, serverless architecture
  • Deliver Agile training: SAFe®, Agile Fundamentals, Scrum, Kanban, Product Owner
  • Support Agile Center of Excellence (CoE), newsletters, lunch & learns, Product Owner summits, Agile Leadership forums, workshops, communities of practice

Organizational Development & Change Management

Our coaches are skilled at aligning change initiatives to agency vision and mission.

  • Coordinate business lines into value streams
  • Support strategic planning, business transformation, digital transformation, strategic organizational design, organizational change management, organizational alignment, and cross-functional decision-making
  • Promote transparency, accountability, compliance, performance metrics, and end-to-end visibility for both internal and external customers
  • Serve as a catalytic change agent for agency change initiatives

Leadership & Team Coaching

We help executives and team members manage change while building a deeper understanding of themselves, the sources of their drive, and their unique strengths to “level up” and become more effective leaders.

  • One-on-one executive coaching and leadership coaching to support a high-performing, mission-focused, agile, and resilient workforce
  • Deliver team coaching to increase motivation, productivity, teamwork, and collaboration
  • Create and deliver transformational leadership development programs, training, and workshops
  • Promote learning approaches that engage all learning styles and create opportunities to learn and practice effective leadership behaviors, acquire new skills and awareness, and apply lessons learned to careers and personal lives
  • Facilitate team offsites and team strategy planning sessions
  • Champion skill building in individuals and teams: collaboration, decision making, respectful dialogue, curiosity, accountability, resilience, courage, employee motivation, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), conflict management, perspective taking, strategic thinking, constructive feedback, flexibility
  • 360 Degree and Lectical assessments
  • Dare to Lead™ coaching
  • Certified coaches by International Coaching Federation (ICF) Associate Certified Coach (ACC) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC)

Agile Acquisition Strategy & Coaching

  • Government Agency acquisition strategy
  • Contract construct and writing support
  • Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP)
  • Test and Evaluation Plan (TP&E) and Test and Evaluation Master Plan (TEMP)
  • Competition & tech demo support

Differentiators

  • Delivered Over 75,000 Agile and Leadership Coaching Hours
  • Coached Over 1,000 Sprints & 3,000 Agile Ceremonies
  • Facilitated Over 30 Team Offsites
  • Led Two Agency-wide, Multi-year, Multi-contract Organizational Transformations
  • Led an Agency-wide Agile Pilot program
  • Trained Over 3,500 People in Agile & Leadership Development Skills
  • Key Leadership Holds CSM & SAFe® Certifications
  • Diverse Experience and Certifications in Agile, Coaching & Other Fields:

Past Performance

We Work with Clients of All Sizes in Both the Public and Private Sector.

Check out our Agile & Leadership coaching clients in the D.C. Metro, Eastern Seaboard, and beyond.

  • Provides Team, Program, and Portfolio-level Agile and Leadership Coaching for a large, complex agile pilot program, which is the first of its kind at FEMA. Consolidated nine lines of business and 46 separate grant programs into a single system and supported this value stream across 15 delivery teams requiring consistent delivery practices and communication.
  • Coaches and supports all Development, Analytics, Security, and DevOps teams across the entire Program. Average team size is six individuals, with a total of 18 BAs, 58 Developers/Engineers, and 22 Testers across all teams.
  • Provides Product Management support, Release Management support, and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) management support, shepherding completed code through the pipeline to production and facilitates the tracking, processing, development, testing, and deployment of O&M issues to production. Coordinates an average of 170 production deployments per month, totaling 6,500 deployments, and tracks regular metrics around production deployments for use in weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting.
  • Coaches all phases of product delivery, including discovery, prioritization, road mapping, story mapping, work estimation, gap analysis, and flow forecasting. Supports up to eight Program Leads between six Product Managers. As of today, shepherded the delivery of 28,613 total story points over 1000 team sprints.
  • Supports and facilitates program ceremonies and practices, including, but not limited to, program kick-offs, program increment planning, portfolio kanban, performance metrics, agile and leadership training, Jira/Confluence configuration, technical delivery practices, business process reengineering, delivery team onboarding, and the communication strategy for the entire Grants Management Modernization program. 
  • Facilitated a total of 3,795 Sprint Grooming and Planning sessions, 20 Roadmap Planning sessions, 1,065 Team Retrospectives, and 225 Program-level and cross-Program Retrospectives.
  • Responsible for developing and regularly updating a modern Agile Delivery Approach that governs all delivery, SecDevOps, Configuration, and Change Control Board processes, ensuring compliance with the hybrid FEMA SDLC, which includes HSPD-12, DHS 4300A, and NIST 800-63-3 Security Standards and requirements.
  • In partnership with the SEC’s Office of the Chief Operating Officer and the Office of Information Technology, wrote and administrated the SEC’s Organizational Agility Assessment. Used the information gleaned in the  assessment to build the Agile Transformation Roadmap, including six strategic Agile Transformation Initiatives.
  • Provides enterprise agile transformation support to ensure a deep understanding of content, cross-collaboration, and a coordinated approach and to prioritization and scaling efforts of the Agile Transformation Teams. Reduced governance and compliance overhead by 54%, reducing waste and increasing time to market by 34%.
  • Leads the Agile Transformation Teach Coaching Cadre by working closely with the Office of Acquisitions, Solutions Delivery Division, IT Project Managers, Product Owners, and contractor delivery teams to create Teaming Agreements, Agile Delivery Operating Models, Program Metrics, and sustainable agile delivery practices across teams, programs, and portfolios.
  • Pioneered the Product Owner Cohort, a four to six-month learning cohort for 12 to 20 active federal Product Owners with the intention of improving product delivery across the agency. To date, we’ve delivered two cohorts and coached 40 Product Owners from across the agency.
  • Continued facilitation and growth of the Agile Center of Excellence (ACoE) which aims to cultivate a growth mindset and continuous learning community through regular ACoE events, monthly Introduction to Agile training, agile communities of practice, bi-monthly agile newsletters, lunch and learns, Product Owner communities of practices, and agile training, all of which brings together both contractors and federal employees. To date, we’ve curated content for and hosted over 70 Agile Lunch and Learns, and composed and distributed over 143 bi-monthly agile newsletters to 5000+ Federal and Contractor SEC subscribers.
  • Partnered with the Office of Acquisitions (OA) bringing agility to the Acquisitions Team and Agile Contracting by introducing and implementing US Digital Services (USDS), 18F, and Digital IT Acquisition Program (DITAP) practices into existing and new contracts. Coordinating among the groups and divisions had led to more complete acquisitions requirements, an updated Statement of Objectives, and an updated Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP).
  • Tailored training curriculum and content to embody industry best practices, then delivered 70+ Introduction to Agile trainings and 45+ workshops to 10,000+ attendees. Topics included  agile leadership, agile mindset, Agile 101, Product Owner roles and responsibilities, user story writing, product visioning, and canvass sessions, et cetera.
  • Introduced, trained, and implemented agile principles, values, and practices across the agency.
  • Created and administered an early Agile Readiness Assessment across 10 business divisions, five branches within OIT, and across the Office of the Chief Operating Officer, then worked to identify the policies that would need to be addressed, rewritten, or eliminated and worked with SEC on a path forward.
  • Crafted the SEC’s Agile Adoption Strategy on risk tolerance, willingness for change, and organizational feasibility.
  • Memorialized SEC’s Adoption Strategy through a three-year Agile Transformation Vision, visualized through the Agile Transformation Roadmap, and normalized through the creation of SEC Agile Playbook, which incorporated federal regulatory and compliance requirements.
  • Launched over a dozen Agile Pilot Programs with products across several business divisions, which created agency-wide vision and alignment and helped shape the initial six key agency agility initiatives.
  • Delivered 20+ Introduction to Agile courses to 500+ employees, 16+ agile workshops to 640+ attendees, and composed and distributed 50+ bi-montly agile newsletters.
  • Drove the cultural change and standardized principles, practices, and tools for the successful adoption of agile, DevOps, and the supporting continuous integration pipeline on the National File Tracking System (NFTS) and the Enterprise Service Bus Microservices (ESBM) rollout. Pliant Solutions supported the development and implementation of scalable, reliable, and resilient pipeline solutions for modernization initiatives.
  • Worked closely with key stakeholders to understand the work structure, introduce processes and practices, and configure the supporting USCIS Enterprise Agile Lifecycle Management Tool.
  • Created, delivered, and curated the content for the Agile Learning Forums and Communities of Practice facilitating the exchange of knowledge across the agency.
  • Provided enterprise-wide Agile Transformation Coaching, consulting, and training to 1350+ federal employees and contractors across multiple branches and programs to help teams attain mastery of agile best practices and a continuous improvement mindset.
  • Supported the Strategic Operating Model through the implementation of Scaled Agile methodology, then assisted in building a comprehensive strategic portfolio management approach and program estimation forecast model.
  • Created and implemented a Team Agile Assessment that provided insights for agile coaches across 20+ Delivery and Operations teams.
  • Worked with teams at all levels to identify needs and develop and deliver Agile and DevOps training curricula tailored to meet USCIS’ goals. Successfully implemented Train-the-Trainer model so that a custom training curriculum could be used by the internal coaches or via a third party.
  • Guided the ALM tool implementation and rollout, providing process metrics (e.g., cycle time, velocity, cumulative flow, etc.), quality metrics (e.g., defect rates, test coverage, static coding standards, etc.), and operations metrics (e.g., incident trends, bug tracking, etc.), to make data-driven decisions.
  • Drove the adoption of CI/CD DevOps-inspired practices. Moved the teams from long release cycles to Team Managed Deployments of a cadence of days and weeks rather than months and quarter while also instilling a “You build it, you own it” mindset, where teams were responsible for seeing their code all the way through production to the customer experience.
  • Provided Enterprise Agile Coaching, establishing vision, business and architectural roadmaps, and backlog.
  • Using product management techniques and concepts such as User Story Mapping, Three Amigos, and Minimum Viable Product, Pliant Solutions facilitated the Listing and Mapping (LiMa) team in building and deploying the Mobile Application within two months – decreasing overall release time by 80%.

Government contract number and references are available upon request.

Simplified Acquisition Threshold

Under $750,000

Under $250,000

Under $25,000

Micro-Purchase (under$10,000)

Company Data

NAICS Codes

  • 541611 - Administration Management & General Management Consulting Services
  • 541330 - Engineering Services
  • 541511 - Custom Computer Programming Services
  • 541512 - Computer Systems Design Services
  • 541519 - Other Computer Related Servies
  • 541611 - Office Adminstrative Services
  • 611430 - Professional & Management Development Training
  • 611710 - Educational Support Services

PSCs

  • R408 - Program Management Support
  • R410 - Program Evaluation, Review, Development Support
  • R425 - Engineering, Technical Support
  • R499 - Other Professional Support
  • R707 - Contract, Procurement, Acquisition Support
  • U008 - Training, Curriculum Development

Company Information

  • UEI: WMRZC8QN9WP8
  • D&B #: 078736168
  • CAGE Code: 6YK33
  • Credit Cards Accepted
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