Sarah Krappweis, PMP, has been a consultant for over 10 years. Her primary areas of focus are project management, business development, and business process engineering for federal contracts large and small.
She is a subject matter expert in Earned Value Management (EVM), a project management method that integrates scope, schedule, and resources in order to objectively monitor progress and performance, and to forecast the project’s outcome. EVM is sometimes a requirement on government contracts, Sarah says, but even when it’s not, it can be a useful tool for planning, tracking, reporting, and identifying potential future problems; so, she recommends that federal contractors be familiar with it (more on that later).
Sarah discovered her calling pretty early in life, thanks, in no small part, to her mother, whose career in nonprofit fundraising seemed to Sarah like the ideal way to fulfill her desire to build relationships and support causes that she cares about. So, fully intending to follow in her mom’s footsteps, she studied Business Administration and Finance in college and worked for a year at a nonprofit. But life had other plans for Sarah; and, to her surprise, she found her sense of purpose fulfilled somewhere else entirely: the federal government space. And indeed, it seems that the career chose her instead of the other way around. As Sarah puts it, she kind of “fell into” the federal contracting world in general and Earned Value Management in particular.
Eager to break into consulting, she jumped at the opportunity to join the EVM team at Accenture and fell in love with consulting immediately, particularly enjoying project management and business process improvement, as they nicely coordinated with her innate skills and interests. After all, she was still the little girl who relished the thrill of a brand-new planner every school year. During her seven years at Accenture, Sarah served in various capacities: as a consultant for Business Operations, where she provided high levels of support for EVM, proposals, and Military Health – and later, stepping into Military Health Management, where she oversaw client and partner relationships; sales, capture, and pricing strategies; RFP responses, creation and submission of presentations and deliverables, metrics reporting, and more. She led pricing strategy and volume development for a $70M IDIQ bid and assisted pricing volume development for a $68M IDIQ bid. She also played point on the creation and design of Tableau dashboards and deployment-reporting infrastructure for a $5.5B Electronic Health Record implementation contract, which was successfully deployed worldwide during the pandemic.
Sarah’s inclination for organization frequently saved her clients a ton of headaches. In one such case, she created and implemented a strategy for status reporting and metrics that allowed their client to cut their 4+ hour-long meetings down significantly: to under 2 hours. She helped them consolidate volumes of information and showed them how to communicate key needs effectively – that is to say, concisely and with clear asks.
These days Sarah is a Focusing Forward consultant and works from home, which means more time with her husband and their 2 young children. From supporting intel clients to military health to space research and more, she still feels grateful to play a part in something so much bigger than herself by solving problems for her clients. directly affects people’s daily lives. She enjoys helping her clients solve problems and create custom solutions to support their primary objectives. To that end, EVM is one of the most valuable tools she uses in her consulting to help clients to take control of their projects and achieve their desired results. Sarah says,
“There is value in measuring your schedule and budget in ways they can be compared. And for contracts without a validated system requirement, they don’t have to use a complicated system to understand how these elements are connected.”
So, whether EVM is a requirement on your contract, or you are just curious about how it can benefit your project planning, please contact us to ask about Sarah’s consulting services, including WBS/WBS Dictionary and IPMR assistance.
Q & A with Sarah
What qualities/experience/knowledge makes you a great consultant in your field?
· Being able to listen to a client’s needs and desires, but also observing the areas they may not be aware of, and articulating a structure or approach that would help meet the desires and the goals of the overall project
· Stakeholder engagement and executive presence – I have the ability to communicate across a wide range of individuals, organizations, and teams to bring the right messaging at the right time.
· I see all my work as a calling – the work I agree to do means more to me than a paycheck. There are people who are directly impacted by the work, and that motivates me to do the best job I can do for them.
· I’m constantly learning and growing and continuous looking to improve my knowledge, processes, and outputs – just because I don’t know or understand something today, I will often work to find the answer and figure out a solution.
What is one of the most important lessons you’ve learned in your career?
Trust the path and don’t try to make multi-year plans. There are so many things that change you never would have anticipated and there are so many more opportunities that you don’t know about. Hold your plans loosely while pursuing your goals – and don’t be afraid or ashamed to change your goals.
What is the best piece of advice you ever received?
I was given this advice during a college fundraising internship. It stuck with me, and I’ve applied it often throughout my career:
“The worst thing people can tell you is no. But they won’t get the chance to answer if you never ask.”
Give us your top 3 book, movie, or podcast recommendations and tell us why they're your favorites.
1. Sharon Says So (Podcast) – I have learned so much about historical events and stories that I had either never heard of or had only heard about in passing. The world is full of fascinating people, both past and present, and I am often challenged and learning new facts while hearing their stories.
2. Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt (book)– The applications of this book are focused on adolescents, but I found them incredibly challenging and applicable to me as well. How much of my life do I spend on my phone, how is it impacting me, and does it reflect who I want to be?
3. Reconnected, Carlos Whittaker (Book) – I read this after Anxious Generation. It’s the story of a man who goes screen free for 7 weeks. Part of that time he lives at a monastery, then at an Amish farm, and finally at home. At the beginning and end of the 7 weeks, he undergoes a brain scan to see what physiological changes the experiment had, and he also unpacks the psychological impacts it has on him throughout the book. This book helped me understand the story behind the data that is presented in Anxious Generation.
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