Building our Capabilities

For as long as I’ve been at FMP (and it is too long to comfortably share), we’ve invested in and focused on growing and enhancing our services and capabilities. Not only is this a reflection of the learning organization we are, where our employees are life-long learners and actively seek out development opportunities, but we continually look for new, better, and more efficient ways of helping our clients.  

Sometimes, this is a simple as learning new technologies or having our team members pursue additional certifications so that we can provide expanded options and expertise to our clients, within an existing service option. We also find that, as our client’s needs become more complex, we don’t always have the time to develop expertise in-house and instead, turn to recruitment to bring in additional depth and experience in an area (e.g., data scientists, UX/UI developers), or to a trusted partner. 

While there are times we need to be nimble and move quickly to be responsive to our clients and industry, we also have a proven model for strategically growing our capabilities over time, which has served us well and resulted in two mature Centers of Excellence (COEs) at FMP. This is an organic growth model where we take an existing service or capability and build it out into an increasingly complex set of specific services, skills, and experiences that can more comprehensively meet our client needs. Let’s take an example from one of our existing Centers of Excellence, Learning and Development (L&D).

As a human capital and management company, FMP has engaged in training, learning, and development activities from the very beginning. Whether it was developing instructor-led training to help with the implementation of a new performance management system or designing a best-in-class onboarding or mentoring program, we were always doing work in this space. That said, we also had people who were passionate about this work and wanted to go deeper, focus specifically on these projects, and build out more comprehensive offerings. True to our culture of entrepreneurialism, those individuals began forming a group, in which they met to discuss our client work, best practices, new certifications and tools, and places where we could go deeper and offer our clients more. This very quickly took the form of a community of practice (COP) and, over time, has evolved into a COE.

At FMP, a COP represents a group of people interested in a particular capability area, who want to create a space for learning from each other by sharing best practices and participating in developmental activities. In some cases, a COP may remain an informal, information-sharing network indefinitely, but for other capability areas, the group feels there is an opportunity to deepen our expertise and expand the knowledge and offerings into a more robust service offering. To make that transition, the group needed to be able to clearly define our services and capabilities, define a market for that work, assess our competitiveness based on our past performance and expertise, articulate a clear strategy, and then attract and grow talent with deep skills, expertise, and passion for the work. This can start slow, with support from our leadership and business development teams, but as we begin to win work and attract new talent with deeper expertise in this area, it can gain momentum quickly. Our L&D COE is now helping organizations move from a “training” culture to a “learning” culture, with learning embedded in work, using performance consulting as the basis, and helping clients identify, measure, and address those gaps using different methods.

More than a decade after we formalized the process of taking a capability and growing it into a Center of Excellence, we now have two COEs and more in the making. Running in parallel with our L&D COE, we also created an Analytics, Technology, and Transformation (ATT) COE which focuses on the transformation of people, processes, and technology, leveraging our expertise in IO psychology, analytics and data science, business process reengineering, organizational design, change management, and information technology. In addition to these COEs, we also have COPs, focused on formalizing our offerings and expertise in the areas of program management and strategic communication. Knowing our workforce, there are likely more conversations around other services already bubbling.

We’ve found that the process of thoughtfully and strategically investing in our capabilities has allowed us to engage and empower our employees and better serve our clients, but we also recognize that sometimes we need to adapt more quickly than this process allows. In that case, balancing our organic growth model with recruitment and partnership has been very successful. I’m proud of the capabilities we’ve developed during my time at FMP and very excited to see what the future holds.

Jessica Milloy is the Chief Operating Officer of FMP Consulting. Jess is from Alexandria, Virginia and enjoys traveling, cooking, and time spent with family and friends.