About Michael Shannon Consulting LLC

Michael Shannon Consulting LLC delivers a unique combination of skill-sets along with its holistic approach to each engagement, deploying expertise across all facets of management, to deliver tailored, comprehensive solutions.  Unlike many firms in the field, our unique approach to business processes ensures that an issue resolved in one area of your business will be resolved across your enterprise.

Michael Shannon Consulting LLC views business processes in the context of our customer’s system capabilities to determine if they are cost effective and leveraging current technology.  Further, we mitigate change management issues throughout the solution design phase using a pragmatic approach to transition planning.  We provide expertise to our clients in documenting system replacement plans and ensuring the timing of system transition is aligned with enterprise development strategies.  In spite of the complexities related to this level of coordination, we consistently deliver the tracking and assessment tools our clients require for the seamless transition within their business environment.

The MSC Team has spearheaded several massive transformation efforts for a multitude of clients. Below is a short overview of some of these projects.

Department of Defense Intragovernmental Transactions Process Standardization. The DoD is the largest department in the Federal government and responsible for $578 billion in net cost of operations and $2.179 trillion in assets. The Team led DoD's effort to redesign the process for intragovernmental transactions in an effort to reduce over $72 billion in intragovernmental eliminations to support the 2017 audit. MSC leveraged the Department's existing Enterprise Architecture to isolate the required process for intragovernmental transactions and then overlaid the functionality of the DoD's business systems, which managed this process. The team then defined standard data elements for each interoperability touch point and led the change management effort of adoption and implementation over the DoD's over 1 million affected employees.

Department of Defense Standard Financial Information Structure (SFIS). The DoD manages over 1,300 active DoD appropriations across 200 unique finance, accounting, contracting, human resource and other supporting IT systems. In order, to effectively account and trace financial information for financial management, it was necessary for DoD to standardize its financial management data structure for all of its end-to-end business processes. MSC has worked with the Office of Secretary of Defense, Comptroller to define the SFIS, facilitating a cross-functional governance board, align it with COTS packages, and assist with its implementation and validation. This has greatly increased DoD's ability to reach a clean audit opinion, track and management FM information, make critical resource decisions and more accurately account for its costs.

Department of Defense Enterprise Cost Management Framework. MSC was tasked directly by the DoD's Chief Financial Officer to establish standard procedures for measuring the full cost of operations for the entire DoD portfolio. The MSC Team led the effort to unify disparate cost management efforts across the DoD (i.e. component and/or local efforts) and identified existing common cost data elements used across DoD stakeholders. Using this information, the team developed a framework that can encompass the entire universe of DoD business and clearly defines all relationships and business rules between operations, warfighter capabilities, organizations, lines of business and resources. The Team then supported the formation of a proof-of-concept program office to begin testing and defining the framework dimensions and applying real world cost information to identify specific areas for cost savings and avoidance.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The complexity of DoD's business process environment has led to the importance of taking a holistic look across its entire enterprise to identify opportunities, which will lead to more effective operations in a more efficient manner. MSC has supported the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer (DCMO) on its current Business Process and Systems Review (BPSR) effort across the DoD. The BPSR aims to identify areas in DoD that will increase it operational performance or decrease its cost without jeopardizing DoD's delivery of products and services. The Team has been able to identify several areas to eliminate manual processes, increase process controls, reduce redundant systems and realign resources and eliminate excess spending.

Investment Review. DoD has roughly 2,000 unique business system investments resulting in tens of billions of dollars in spending, which require oversight to ensure compliance with laws, policies, and regulations. MSC has been critical for providing expert analytics to ensure compliance for this massive portfolio. This has allowed DoD to determine whether it is getting what it asked for and that funding is properly managed and allocated. Overall, the Team has been able to assist DoD in reducing its investment cost while increasing the quality of its business system investments.