Blog
We enjoy sharing our experiences through blogs posts, as we continuously seek new ways to serve our clients.
I have always been passionate about automobiles and traveling so it seems fortuitous that a lot of our recent consulting projects in 2015 and 2016 have been on these very topics. On the strategic and business planning front we recently facilitated executives at the California…
A team of Highlands’ consultants were recently certified by PQS, Inc., to facilitate Rapid Process Improvement (RPI) events. RPI is a highly-interactive method of business process analysis that focuses on resolving problem workflows and returning rapid results that can be implemented quickly. RPI is based…
Highlands is proud to announce that nine of our consultants are now certified in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): Nikki Angle, Demetre Haralambakis, Michele Rickey-Pidd, Mike Cappelluti, Eric Norton, Will Cuper, Judy Melson, Amanda Priest, and Jacob Olson. SAFe delivers a strategy for implementing Agile at…
The Highlands Consulting Group is assisting the State of California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) with implementation of ePlanCheck (ePC), a tool for the electronic submission, review, and approval of architecture and other building plans. ENVISION: We are using our knowledge of…
As we help our clients adapt to the State’s new Project Approval Lifecycle, we find we’re being asked to define “mid-level requirements” to support the alternatives analysis that happens early in the procurement process. For those who aren’t familiar with the Project Approval Lifecycle –…
A growing trend in public sector information technology (IT) procurement is the 50/50 evaluation: assigning 50% of available points to cost and 50% to the solution. The logic is that weighing cost at 50% forces bidders to reduce their costs and assures the buyer the…
In our last blog post, my colleague Nikki Angle wrote about the myths and realities of Agile in government. It’s a significant shift that requires increased communication, readiness assessments, training, and reinforcement – all components that we deliver every day through organizational change management. Two State of California…
We hear about ‘Agile’ in government projects more and more frequently. It’s not a new concept, but one with many misconceptions that can derail a transition from a Waterfall to Agile environment. According to Maria Burton from Focus on Training, her teams experienced three common myths as they transitioned…
Change can be difficult, and usually when an organization undergoes change things get worse before they get better. I recently heard this phenomenon described as the “square root of change” – and I think it’s something that project sponsors and project managers too often neglect.…
Highlands Consulting has outgrown our former office space on the 15th floor of the Wells Fargo Building in Downtown Sacramento. Our weekly all-staff meetings were getting crowded and our existing lease was ending, so we were pleased to find a new, larger office on the…