Co-Creating a Four-Year IT Infrastructure Roadmap

Accenture Federal Services, Service Design Lead, 2019

My Role: Design Lead, team of 2 (+ 5 IT consultants) · Timeline: 2 months · Impact: Delivered the agency's first formal IT infrastructure strategy and feature roadmap

The Challenge

A large federal agency had strong IT leadership but no cohesive infrastructure strategy. Teams across the Office of the CIO had their own priorities and their own backlogs, but leadership hadn't been able to align them around a shared set of goals they could realistically achieve over the next three to five years. Without that alignment, modernization efforts were ad hoc and disconnected.

The Solution

I led the design facilitation workstream on a $2B contract, managing a team of two designers and collaborating with five IT consultants to co-create the agency's first formal IT infrastructure strategy with Office of the CIO leadership.

Over two months, I planned and facilitated four day-long workshops with agency leadership — each one building on the last. We moved from articulating a shared vision, to defining strategic objectives, to crafting and prioritizing three IT infrastructure epics for the agency's four-year modernization plan. One workshop used a "ski run" framework — green circle, blue square, black diamond — to help agency leaders quickly estimate the level of effort for workforce training goals, making an abstract planning exercise tangible.

After the strategy was set, the CIO asked our team to help communicate it internally. I developed a physical booklet that could be printed and produced in-house (no specialized equipment or vendors required) alongside digital communications artifacts. I also supported agency and Accenture leadership in preparing and delivering training sessions on the new strategy.

The Outcome

The workshops produced something the agency had never had: a shared, documented IT infrastructure strategy with leadership buy-in. The vision, strategic objectives, and three prioritized epics gave the Office of the CIO a framework for making investment decisions and aligning teams across the organization, turning modernization from a set of disconnected projects into a coordinated four-year effort.