CONSULTATION SERVICES (SIN 874-1)

Quality Plus Engineering provides expert advice, guidance, assistance, assurance, and counseling to support a wide range of management, organizational and business improvement and risk/control initiatives.  Examples of the types of QPE management advisory, assurance, and consultation services available include:

• Enterprise Risk Management Planning and Execution.  Q+E uses its trademarked Value Added Auditing^® governance, risk, and control methodologies to develop, define, and execute agency and department risk management.  These two strategic and business planning techniques are extremely effective with senior Federal agency executives at the Secretarial and Assistant Secretarial levels. Our executive consultants normally arrange for an off-site location that is conducive to taking a fresh look at the agency's enterprise risk management vision, mission, and strategies for the future. We combine pre-planned presentations, discussions with customers, strategic planning exercises, and group discussions to foster innovative and creative risk identification and management.  By focusing on both the needs of the agency and its stakeholders, the agency's leadership can target key risk management opportunities and develop meaningful enterprise risk management plans to concentrate resources on critical risk areas.
• Value Added Auditing^®.  Q+E is the developer of a widely used risk and process based methodology for conducting risk, control, and assurance assessments.  Value Added Audits satisfy compliance requirements but are also proactive, preventive, predictive and even preemptive auditing. The assessments are harmonized with ISO 9000 – 2000, COSO enterprise risk management (ERM), Government Accounting Office (GAO), Institute of Internal Auditor, and other standards.

Value Added Auditing^® focuses on forward looking actions, that involve being 1. proactive; 2. preventive; 3. predictive; and 4. preemptive.  These actions with the appropriate interventions can reduce nonconformances and mitigate risks.  These audits are the state of the art for conducting baseline risk/control assessments, developing benchmark criteria, and then completing a gap analysis.  Value Added Auditing^® risk/control methodologies is the next step of ‘effective’ Business Process Management and ISO 9000 assessments.  Value Added Audit assurance assessments can be used for:
 

• Homeland security assessments.
• Agency/department governance assessments.
• Management audits and reviews.
• Risk/control assessments.
• Cost control assessments.
• Performance assessments.
• Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) Red Book assessments.
• General Accounting Office (GAO) Yellow Book assessments.
• Quality Management Systems (QMS ISO 9000) audits.
• Environmental Management System (EMS ISO 14000) audits.
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Good Manufacturing Practices.
• Cyber Security (crypto) and IT assessments.
• Risk/control assessments (Sarbanes-Oxley 404 for operations).
• Energy efficiency audits (thermodynamics).
• Forensics (product) assessments.
• Food Safety assessments (HACCP).
• Safety oversight.

• Supply Chain (Contract) Management.  Q+E is a national leader in all facets of supply and contract management.  Q+E founded and manages the supply management portal along with the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the Institute of Supply Management.  Q+E offers and implements the full range of supply management methodologies, tools, and techniques involving:
   
  • Supply chain management architecture.
  • Customer requirement management.
  • Supply chain strategies.
  • SCM leadership development.
  • SCM tools and techniques.
  • SCM process maturity models.
  • Supply development process.
  • Supply development – certification.
  • Supply development – continuous Improvement.
  • Supply development – measurement.
  • Supply Risk Management.
  • Process and product innovation.  
     
• Succession Planning and Institutionalizing Core Capabilities. All Federal agencies are seeing a changing of the guard as baby boomers retire.  Many of these are engineers providing core functions to the agency.  Succession planning and institutionalizing core capabilities are now mission-critical goals of all federal agencies.  Otherwise, core and mission-critical capabilities will be lost forever. Q+E works with Federal executives to determine what is 'inherently governmental' and then develops a plan and deploys strategies to ensure continuity and assure process capability.  Q+E, as an engineering company, primarily focuses on technical succession planning and institutionalizing technical core capabilities, such as engineering services.
• Outsource Technical Services. As part of A-76, Q+E also provides business process outsourcing services, especially in technical areas such as engineering, IT, quality assurance, quality control, purchasing, etc.
• IT Systems Alignment.  Q+E ensures IT systems alignment by developing consistent communication and deployment of senior executive’s risk management vision, mission, and strategies.  QPE expert engineers and consultants work with Federal executives to develop a plan to communicate an enterprise risk management strategies to employees, customers, and other stakeholders. This shared vision of the organization's risk management future is then used to drive IT systems alignment.  Q+E will integrate the appropriate solutions based on the maturity and capability level of the organization.
• Cycle Time Reduction.  Q+E focuses on cycle time reduction for its program management, project management, and product development initiatives.  Cycle time is the elapsed time required to produce a product or service, from start to finish.  It is a major factor in improving stakeholder satisfaction and improving organizational performance.  This is an important part of many Federal agency risk management, contractor management, and program/project management business improvement initiatives.  Our consultants help Federal agency staff visualize the full set of activities in a business process and analyze the cycle times for completing activity sequences under various program, project, process, and work configurations and scenarios.
• High Performance Work and Career Management Services.  Q+E offers innovative, trademarked, and even patented solutions to support Federal agencies as they implement high performance and risk management work strategies. These strategies often apply information age concepts and collaborative information tools to transform Federal worker interactions with their management, colleagues, suppliers, and customers.  To drive and deploy this initiative, Q+E has developed the trademarked Brand U^®, Working It^®, 7Ps - Paradigms – People – Principles – Practices – Products – Processes – Projects.^® Q+E also developed www.WorkingIt.com to facilitate high performance work and career management.
• Leadership/Governance Training.  The Q+E Team offers seminars, off-site workshops, and one-on-one consultation to support the governance and leadership development goals of Federal agencies.  For example, Q+E has developed the trademarked 7P work methodology: Paradigms – People – Principles – Practices – Products – Processes – Projects^® to facilitate leadership and governance training.
  
  Participants examine their organizational objectives, missions, strategies, and performance to develop attributes of future leadership systems. These attributes guide participants as they develop leadership system development plans and also allow the Q+E Team to customize the leadership/governance systems training. Our leadership/governance training services can include visits with recognized industry leaders in the public and private sectors to allow direct interchange of leadership best practices.
• Performance Measurement.  Q+E works with Federal agencies to establish key performance measures of mission critical risk, cost, performance, productivity, and efficiency.  Much of this work directly supports implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). We help agencies prepare for the phased implementation of performance-based management by developing meaningful metrics and then benchmarking their performance against other organizations that produce similar products or services.
• Enterprise, Project, Process Risk Management.  Q+E experts understand that each Federal agency has unique risk management requirements and stakeholders.  The challenge is that process, project, and productivity improvement continues to be a top priority for our Federal customers.  Based in these requirements, improvement services are tailored to our client's special needs, from quality management, risk management, program/project management, process management to business process reengineering.  For instance, if the requirement is for dramatic risk mitigation and reduction, we work with agency staff to: (1) establish leadership support and vision for risk sensitivity and risk management; (2) perform as-is risk/control modeling; (3) conduct risk/control effectiveness analysis; (4) develop to-be models; (5) document the enterprise, project/process, and activity level business case; and (6) implement the optimum risk management solution. This proven risk management methodology combines our trademarked risk management and business process improvement experiences with highly effective decision support technology to produce superior results for our Federal customers.