Although many of you may know that I joined Resolvit on July 1 as a Partner leading the Washington, DC Metro Area office, what you may not know is that I was one of Resolvit’s first clients back in 2002 when I was with PricewaterhouseCoopers. In subcontracting to Resolvit I knew that Resolvit would always provide deliver highly-talented, reasonably-priced consultants. The same reasons that attracted me to Resolvit when I was a Resolvit client were true when I was ready for my next career adventure – and therefore I decided to join Resolvit earlier this year.
And I have to say, the only thing better than being a Resolvit client is being a member of the Resolvit team. Since starting I have found that the magic of Resolvit can be boiled down to:
1) Our People: We have a very talented team of Consultants in the field delivering the highest-value and highest-quality services to our clients.
2) Our Clients: We have a solid blue chip client base where our consultants have deep-seated roots within our clients and a history of delivering business value.
Getting to Know Our People
In getting to know the quality of Resolvit, the place to start is by getting to know Resolvit’s people. Resolvit’s people are the heart of our business and who represent diverse professional backgrounds and strong client relationships. So when I started with Resolvit, I decided to meet and spend time with each of the DC office’s consultants. Below, I’ll highlight just two of our employees that are indicative of each and every member of our talented consultant team.
Robbie Robinson has been with Resolvit since 2002. Robbie has deep experience as a program manager helping our clients implement complex business systems. Through Robbie’s Resolvit career, Robbie was originally staffed Robbie at Sprint. After two years with Sprint, Robbie moved to Fannie Mae for 1 year and then on to Freddie Mac. Most recently Robbie has been at FEPOC helping to manage the implementation of FEPOC’s Claims Management System. Robbie is a great example of one of our consultants who understands the value that a consultant with deep, hands-on industry expertise brings to our clients. Over the years, Robbie has not only helped implement our clients’ complex systems, but Robbie has helped Resolvit and our Account Management team gain the kind of deep industry expertise that differentiates Resolvit from our would-be competitors. In addition, Robbie helps our Recruiters screen potential candidates for our ever-expanding team of Resolvit Consultants.
Another employee who embodies the Resolvit spirit is Jean Byrd. Jean started with Resolvit as a Systems Analyst on a project at Geico. While at Geico Jean used her expertise in analyzing, designing, and building website user interfaces and analyzing website user experiences to conduct analyses and make recommendations to Geico’s external sales website. After getting to know Jean I realized that Jean had the skills and experience to help us build Resolvit’s eMarkeitng practice. So after working at Geico, we redeployed Jean to the US Navy Memorial to provide the strategy for increasing the participation of the visitors to Washington DC’s Navy Memorial and to redesign and implement the websites for the US Navy Memorial (http://NavyMemorial.org) and their Penn Quarter Conference Center (http://www.pennquarterconferencecenter.org). In addition, Jean participates in writing our eMarketing proposals for Federal, nonprofit, and corporate clients. As this practice gets going, we have already won projects at the Navy Memorial, the Kennedy Krieger Foundation, and the Water Environment Federation.
Understanding Our Clients
We all understand that our clients hire us to help solve their toughest business problems. If these problems weren’t difficult to solve, they wouldn’t need our help. To understand our clients’ business, I spent the past few months sitting down with senior leaders at each of our clients to discuss their business challenges; understand how the recent changes in the economy are impacting their business; and determining how Resolvit can help them meet these challenges. Upon understanding these challenges, we work with our clients to help them solve these problems in one of two ways: 1) strategic staffing or 2) business consulting solutions.
The projects based out of our Washington DC office are divided about evenly between strategic staffing and business consulting solutions. Strategic staffing includes augmenting a client or prime contractor’s team with additional strategic talent. This talent may be a Program Manger, Sr. Java Developer, or Systems Security Specialist. Business consulting solutions represent an end-to-end solution, such as providing a continuity of operations plan (COOP) or implementing a new web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system.
As an example of a strategic staffing project, Brenda Wolfkill has been a Resolvit employee working for Time Warner Cable since 2006. Brenda’s responsibilities include handling change requests, maintaining the change management database, and facilitating order flow processing. Her role is strategic to Time Warner Cable because Brenda is a seasoned program manager and her skills ensure the seamless operation of the network necessary to provide a high level of service to Time Warner Cable customers.
An example of a business consulting project is one of the projects we are managing and implementing at the District Court of Washington DC. For the District Court, Resolvit has been engaged to design, build, and implement a system to create a Web Transcript Tracking System. This system is responsible for taking the verbatim record of the proceedings in the various courts in Superior Court and, when requested to do so, for producing transcripts ordered by judges, attorneys, and other litigants and non-litigants.
Business Outlook
I would like to take a minute to discuss Resolvit’s business outlook and the overall economy’s growth for 2009. The consulting business tends to be a leading economic indicator of the overall economy’s health. The Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson posited that there are certain predictable factors in the US economy that trigger a business cycle’s top and bottom. One of the signals that trigger economic growth is corporate investment in new equipment and technology. Simply put, businesses’ plant and equipment wears out and technology becomes obsolete. As our clients invest in new technology and equipment, they need consulting firms’ help, such as Resolvit, in installing, configuring, and implementing these investments in infrastructure.
In talking to each and every one of our clients in the DC area over the past few months I have every reason to believe that our business will experience rapid growth in early 2009, followed by growth of the overall economy in the latter portion of 2009.
As I get to know our employees and our clients, I have nothing but optimism for the coming year. Since starting in consulting in 1991 I have observed that prior to every economic recovery smart consulting firms experience dramatic growth. The trick to participating in this growth is prudently weathering the economic downturn by sticking to the fundamentals of taking care of your employees and ensuring that our consultants provide measurable, sustained business value to our clients.