Organizational Transformation Lead for Mission Execution

DRT Strategies, Inc; Silver Spring, Northern (MD, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

DRT Strategies, Inc. seeks an accomplished Organizational Effectiveness & Mission Execution SME to lead a two‑phase engagement for FDA OGPS and OPLIA.

The role combines federal program management, organizational assessment, and leadership facilitation to deliver practical, decision‑ready recommendations on time and within constraints. The ideal candidate will manage a compact multidisciplinary team, maintain continuity between phases, and advise senior federal leaders while ensuring rigorous,

Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of progressively responsible experience in program management, management consulting, organizational transformation, or mission/organizational support, with substantial experience supporting U.S. Federal Government clients.
• Demonstrated experience leading federal organizational assessments, organizational redesign or operating‑model efforts, workforce planning, succession planning, or comparable organizational transformation engagements.
• Proven experience managing complex firm‑fixed‑price (FFP) professional‑services engagements with multiple tightly sequenced deliverables, fixed deadlines, interdependent tasks, and significant schedule, scope, quality, and resource risk.
• Demonstrated ability to enter a high‑visibility engagement quickly, establish structure and credibility, and produce results in a compressed delivery environment with changing priorities and limited ramp‑up time.
• Exceptional organizational and political acumen, professional diplomacy, and executive presence, with the ability to read stakeholder dynamics, navigate sensitive issues and competing interests, and maintain trusted relationships across leadership and staff levels.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct or lead sensitive employee and leadership interviews and facilitate organizational assessments in a neutral, respectful, and trust‑preserving manner, particularly where workforce or organizational changes may create concern or resistance.
• Strong expertise in organizational design and assessment concepts such as functions and capabilities, management layers and spans of control, workload and capacity, role clarity, decision rights, operating models, process handoffs, organizational dependencies, and implementation sequencing.
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative assessment methods, including structured interviews, surveys, workload analysis, staffing/FTE analysis, benchmarking, synthesis of mixed evidence, and development of defensible recommendations.
• Experience facilitating senior leadership sessions, retreats, cross‑functional working sessions, and roles‑and‑responsibilities discussions, including the ability to surface disagreement and move groups toward practical alignment without overstepping federal decision authority.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the overall delivery lead across two sequential phases: first, the OGPS Organizational Redesign and Leadership Succession Planning effort; then, the OPLIA Mission Execution Support Services effort. Maintain continuity of leadership, methods, lessons learned, and team performance as the engagement transitions from Section I to Section II.
• Act as a trusted advisor and primary senior‑level interface with FDA leadership and the COR; anticipate stakeholder concerns, navigate competing priorities and organizational dynamics, and communicate issues, tradeoffs, and decisions with discretion and professionalism.
• Mobilize Section I rapidly and establish the delivery approach, staffing model, governance cadence, master schedule, quality process, communications plan, risk registry, and clear ownership of deliverables and dependencies.
• Manage a dense portfolio of tightly sequenced deliverables within each phase, maintaining traceability from current‑state evidence to recommendations and ensuring that downstream products are built on validated findings.
• Lead and oversee organizational assessment activities, including document review, structured interviews, surveys, workload analysis, FTE/capacity analysis, federal benchmarking, organizational structure review, functional mapping, decision‑rights analysis, and identification of organizational strengths, gaps, duplication, fragmentation, and misalignment.
• Design and facilitate sensitive interviews, leadership retreats, cross‑organizational working sessions, and roles‑and‑responsibilities clarity engagements in a manner that builds trust, reduces defensiveness, surfaces candid information, and recognizes that staff may be concerned about how assessment findings could affect their roles.
• Ensure assessment products are balanced, evidence‑based, and constructive—clearly distinguishing facts, observations, risks, and recommendations; identifying strengths and capabilities to preserve as well as opportunities to improve; and avoiding unsupported, overly categorical, or unnecessarily harsh conclusions.
• Lead development and quality review of future‑state organizational alternatives, organizational design principles and evaluation criteria, process and operating improvement recommendations, implementation roadmaps, leadership capability requirements, succession planning frameworks, workforce planning analyses, coordination protocols, and mission‑positioning communications.
• Maintain strict boundaries between contractor advisory support and federal decision‑making. Ensure the team does not conduct formal performance appraisals, determine personnel actions, direct federal staff, make workforce or organizational decisions, or otherwise perform inherently governmental functions.
• Own FFP delivery discipline by managing scope, level of effort, staffing, schedule, and quality against the agreed requirements; identify scope creep and resource pressure early; evaluate the feasibility of ad hoc requests; and elevate recommended tradeoffs before commitments create delivery risk.
• Oversee preparation and timely submission of the Program Management Plan, Monthly Status Reports, meeting agendas and minutes, action‑item trackers, risk updates, executive briefings, and other required or ad hoc deliverables; manage Government review comments, revisions, and acceptance.
• Provide hands‑on leadership and quality assurance to a compact, multidisciplinary team of approximately five staff during Section I, spanning organizational development, workforce/human capital, research/data analysis, facilitation, communications, and project management capabilities. Plan and execute the team's transition into Section II and support onboarding or integration of an additional team member if the staffing model expands.
• Ensure sensitive organizational, personnel, staffing, and PII‑related information is handled appropriately and that all project activities comply with applicable FDA/HHS privacy, security, records‑management, and confidentiality requirements.
• Support remote, hybrid, and on‑site project activities at FDA facilities as required, including leadership sessions, interviews, organizational assessment activities, and cross‑organizational engagements.

Skills

Program management

Management consulting

Organizational transformation

Executive communication

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Federal government projects

Education

Bachelor's degree

PMP certification

Master's degree

Job description

DRT Strategies, Inc. seeks an accomplished Organizational Effectiveness & Mission Execution SME to lead a two‑phase engagement for FDA OGPS and OPLIA.

The role combines federal program management, organizational assessment, and leadership facilitation to deliver practical, decision‑ready recommendations on time and within constraints. The ideal candidate will manage a compact multidisciplinary team, maintain continuity between phases, and advise senior federal leaders while ensuring rigorous,