Once they had collected and reviewed stakeholder feedback, they used a priority matrix to decide what to tackle first.

 

Matrix Sorting Tasks by Difficulty and Impact:

1. Easy, high-impact items came first

2. Easy, low-impact items came second

3. Difficult, high-impact items came third

4. Difficult, low-impact items were deferred

That helped them avoid trying to do everything at once. It also gave them a framework for discussing tradeoffs and sequencing work.

What Rose to the Top

One high-impact, relatively easy improvement was standardizing proposal kickoff meetings.

Before that, kickoff meetings were not consistently structured, even though they were central to aligning principal investigators and stakeholders around proposal strategy, content, and submission.

Another example was month-end reporting, which Johnson’s team implemented quickly. A more difficult but highly impactful effort was creating a standard forecasting file, since there had been no consistent way for people to forecast project expenditures.

That work required more effort, but it dramatically improved reporting and sponsor visibility.

A more difficult, lower-visibility effort was equipment reporting and inventory.

ARLIS was tracking equipment and materials in multiple places and multiple ways, so consolidating that into a more uniform system became a longer-term project.

Step Three: Communicate Change Deliberately

Rumeau emphasized that identifying priorities was not enough. The team also needed to communicate those priorities clearly across the stakeholder landscape.

Using the stakeholder matrix as a guide, they started with the most influential and most invested groups first.

They developed a training plan for each new process they introduced so people would understand:

• What was changing?

• Why it was changing?

• How to use the new process

• When implementation and training would occur

They also built in room for feedback and continuous improvement. If a process was not working, they were willing to adjust it.

The point was not to treat every new process as fixed forever, but to create enough structure to move the organization out of constant reaction mode.

What They Implemented in the First Year

Over roughly a year, Rumeau and Johnson led a series of practical improvements across pre-award and post-award work.

Some of the major changes included:

• A formal improvement plan, required by President Pines as part of a strategic investment in administrative capacity

• Standardized monthly reporting for government sponsors

• A standardized forecasting methodology

• Proposal kickoff meetings with more relevant stakeholders at the table

• Project kickoffs and closeouts

• A more rigorous proposal development process

• Financial planning templates

• Rough-order-of-magnitude templates for early sponsor conversations

• Project transition planning between proposal and award

Johnson noted that monthly reporting had previously varied widely by project. Standardizing those reports created more consistency in status updates, key risks, financial data, and forward-looking forecasts.

Forecasting became especially important because ARLIS was working within university systems more commonly used for grants than for federal contract work. To fill that gap, the team built Excel-based forecasting tools that pulled expenditure data from university systems and helped principal investigators compare actual costs to plans and update forecasts monthly.

Proposal kickoffs also improved execution quality by surfacing missing personnel, long-lead equipment needs, and required security controls earlier in the process.

Not every new process was immediately popular. Johnson acknowledged that people were still “grumpy” about project kickoffs and closeouts. But even with that resistance, those meetings were revealing important execution details that had previously been missed.

What Comes Next

ARLIS is still working through larger structural improvements, including:

• A more unified asset management system

• A 10-year financial plan

• Internal project audits to strengthen compliance and execution oversight

Rumeau and Johnson also continue to meet weekly to coordinate improvements and identify what should move up—or down—the priority list.

The Core Lesson

Their message was not that an organization can move from reactive to proactive overnight. In fact, they stressed the opposite.

Their advice was to:

• Keep collecting feedback

• Prioritize ruthlessly

• Start with lower-effort changes that create meaningful impact

• Plan for larger, harder improvements over time

• Treat change as continuous improvement, not a one-time fix

For teams entering a program midstream, their experience offers a practical reminder. Before you can become proactive, you need enough structure, collaboration, and shared priorities to stop living entirely in response mode.