Process Design & Redesign
Citizens don't experience your mission.
They experience your process.
Government mission delivery runs through hundreds of processes, some facing citizens directly, like the revenue systems that fund public services, the benefits programs millions depend on, and the health and human services that protect them, and others working behind the scenes, like the procurement that funds agency operations, the program integrity work that protects public dollars from fraud, and the privacy protections that safeguard citizen data. Many of these processes were built years or decades ago, layered on top of each other as regulations, systems, and staff changed, until no one person can fully explain how work actually moves from request to result. We partner with agency teams to map how work really happens, redesign it around the outcome that matters, and build the technology and automation into the process itself from the start, so the experience citizens and staff actually have finally matches the mission it’s meant to serve.
Process design is where mission strategy meets daily reality. Every redesign, whether it reshapes a citizen-facing service or a back-office workflow, is built around how people actually work, with the technology built in rather than bolted on.
What we hear from government clients
Every extra step in a process is a cost citizens pay, not just government
Public administration research describes this as administrative burden, the learning, compliance, and psychological costs citizens absorb every time a process is unclear, redundant, or hard to navigate. Those costs fall hardest on the people with the least time, information, or trust to spare, and they shape how citizens experience government long after the transaction ends.
Undocumented, inconsistent processes don't just slow work down, they show up as losses on the government's books.
Executive branch agencies have reported cumulative improper payment estimates of about $3 trillion since fiscal year 2003, including $186 billion in a single recent fiscal year alone, and GAO has found these payments to represent a persistent weakness in internal controls, not simply the result of external bad actors. Much of that exposure runs through the benefit, health, and revenue programs that states and localities administer jointly with federal partners, which means the risk lives in both federal and local process design. When a process depends on individual judgment instead of a designed, consistent workflow, the government isn’t just risking a slow transaction, it’s risking the kind of control weakness that auditors are required to report.
A single process rarely lives inside a single office.
Public sector process research consistently finds that government workflows are unusually fragmented, spanning multiple departments, systems, and approval chains, which makes it hard to see where a process actually breaks or to coordinate a fix across every office that owns a piece of it. Redesigning one office’s piece of the process without touching the rest just moves the bottleneck downstream.
What we do about it
Current-state process mapping
We document how work actually happens today, not how the policy manual or org chart says it should, surfacing the workarounds, handoffs, and bottlenecks that usually live only in people’s heads.
Process and experience redesign
We rebuild the process around the person moving through it, citizen or staff member, removing the steps that exist out of habit rather than necessity, so the process reflects the mission it’s meant to serve.
Embedded automation and technology
We build automation and digital tools into the redesigned process itself rather than layering them on top of the old one, the approach behind successful modernization efforts and the reason research consistently finds that technology added on top of a process that has not been carefully designed, tends to fall short of its goals.
Cross-office process governance
We align the departments, systems, and approval chains that share ownership of a process, so a redesign holds together end to end instead of shifting the bottleneck to the next office in line.
Documentation and knowledge transfer
We turn tribal knowledge into documented, repeatable process, so performance doesn’t depend on any one person staying in their seat.