Program Management at Vaultes

Many digital services companies develop a matrixed environment to support their teams in terms of program compliance, people management, and technical expertise. This often looks like technical expertise support from experienced practitioners, such as Directors or principal level subject matter experts, solution architects, enterprise coaches, and so forth, combined with contractual compliance support from Program Managers. While this approach ensures oversight, it introduces a fair amount of complexity, and often results in program delivery being several steps removed from company leadership.  

Our program management practice at Vaultes is unique. On the surface, it looks like a typical government consulting set-up: each program is assigned a Program Manager who is responsible for serving as the main point of contact with our government clients and for ensuring the team delivers work that meets contractual requirements. However, it’s not quite that simple underneath. 

According to a 2014 study from the American Council for Technology¹, government IT project success depends on having a Program Manager with strong compliance and technical skills.  

At Vaultes, we believe in this approach. Our Program Managers are highly experienced in the traditional sense: they hold project, product, and program management certifications and have years of experience within government or government consulting. Along with these compliance skills, our Program Managers also have technical backgrounds, which ensures that our Program Managers can speak to the technical quality of the delivery teams’ work. That allows them to serve as true translators and connective tissue between delivery teams and our government stakeholders. They are equipped to be experienced thought-partners to stakeholders, and, in collaboration with a program’s technical practitioners, can ideate and serve as solution architects for complex government ecosystems.  

In addition to being a strong throughline from the team to the government stakeholders, our Program Managers are able to identify delivery risks early on due to their technical expertise. They know high-quality work because they have done it themselves and can proactively flag and remediate delivery risks and ensure high delivery outcomes because of their deep expertise.  

Our structure is built to operate in a lean, modular way with minimal overhead staff without sacrificing communication and delivery quality. In fact, our streamlined Program Management approach means we actually reduce the likelihood of communication and delivery errors. We don’t require lots of overhead staff to ensure delivery quality, because those team members are already embedded on the team in the form of our technical Program Managers and technical leads (on larger programs). Having minimal overhead roles allows us to pass savings on to our client without reducing work quality. It also reduces the layers between our company leadership and our delivery work, which speaks to another core Vaultes value: that delivery quality remains a top priority at all levels of our organization. Our Program Managers have immediate access to our Executive Leadership team and our growing Program Management Office. Our Program Managers are well-supported internally, so they can in turn focus on supporting our government clients and delivery teams.  

We’ve designed our organization in the same way that we like to design our solutions – lean, flexible, modular, adaptable, and built simply to reduce as many potential failure points as possible. When you choose to work with Vaultes, we assign each contract a Program Manager. If one is not in scope or budget for the contract, we provide one at no cost to clients – that’s how firmly we believe that our Program Managers help our teams deliver value. When you choose Vaultes for your digital services projects, know that everyone on the team has the expertise to deliver frictionless, high value experiences and similarly frictionless, high-quality outcomes.  

If you’d like to learn more about our Program Management Practice or our Digital Government Services, schedule a time to speak with us at info@vaultes.com.