Navy Financial Management and Comptroller (FM&C) leadership had a fair question and no clean way to answer it. Why did some of the ERP projects experience schedule or cost variancet? Dozens of ERP initiatives were in flight at once, spanning audit readiness, system migrations, and sustainment work. There was no single source of truth for cost, schedule, or risk, and no shared view of how proactively each program was being managed. One flagship initiative had been re-estimated five times over as its scope grew, with costs climbing well past the original baseline.
BluJuniper deployed its Beacon© Enterprise Portfolio Management methodology across the portfolio. We engaged more than 100 stakeholders and reviewed thousands of source documents. Using Beacon's four-phase approach of Discover, Design, Implement, and Integrate, we stood up real-time dashboards for strategy, portfolio health, and variance root causes. A deep-dive assessment of the highest-variance program traced its cost growth to scope creep, system readiness gaps, and estimation gaps. For the first time, leadership had one data-driven dashboard using a custom view of their portfolio: strategic alignment, investment distribution, estimation process map highlighting bottlenecks/areas of improvements, root cause view, and project health,
Technology & Methods Used
Beacon© Enterprise Portfolio Management, strategy and portfolio dashboards, variance and root-cause analytics, structured stakeholder assessment instruments, project health scoring models, organizational change management, business process optimization model
About the Client
The client is the U.S. Navy's Financial Management and Comptroller (FM&C) organization, responsible for governing a large and complex portfolio of enterprise resource planning and IT modernization programs that underpin Navy audit readiness and financial operations.
Industry
Federal Government, Defense
Outcomes at a Glance
Unified View of Portfolio Health
Roadmap to a Program Excellence Center
Business Problem
- No Single Source of Truth: Dozens of in-flight Navy ERP IT projects spanning audit readiness, system migrations, and sustainment work, with no unified view of cost, schedule, or risk.
- Limited Portfolio Visibility: Leadership wanted greater confidence in portfolio health reporting and a single, shared view of how proactively each initiative was progressing.
- Cost Growth on a Flagship Program: One flagship initiative had been re-estimated across five successive revisions as scope evolved, with costs rising beyond the original baseline.
Solution Approach
- Enterprise Stakeholder Engagement: Engaged more than 100 stakeholders across Navy leadership and program offices through structured interviews, project health assessments, and questionnaires.
- End-to-End Process Lifecycle Mapping: Reviewed thousands of source documents and process libraries to map the cross-functional estimation project lifecycle from end to end.
- Beacon© EPM Deployment: Applied the four-phase Beacon© methodology (Discover, Design, Implement, Integrate) to develop executive dashboard including strategy, portfolio, and variance-root-cause views.
- Root-Cause Deep Dive: Traced cost growth on the highest-variance program to scope creep, system readiness gaps, and estimation gaps.
Value Delivered
Navy leadership gained its first unified view of portfolio health across cost, schedule, and risk. Fragmented, program-by-program reporting gave way to a single evidence base dashboard. We were able to isolate the real drivers of recurring schedule and cost variance which included a-typical approaches such as assessing estimation process flow and efficiency as well as stakeholder engagement practice along with a dashboard that complemented the visiting into the portfolio.
The larger shift was operational. FM&C leadership moved from managing each program in isolation to running the whole portfolio on one consistent, optimization-driven model.
Where This Fits in North*Star©
Beacon© EPM
This is Beacon© EPM in action. BluJuniper made a large, complex Navy IT portfolio measurable and actively managed, giving leadership a single governed view of cost, schedule, risk, and underlying governance process along with a clear path toward a Program Excellence Center.