Forest Service Human Resources Enterprise Solutions (HRES) department optimizes the employee experience for their workforce of 40,000 permanent and temporary seasonal employees, who manage the 193 million acres of public lands known collectively as the National Forest System. The natural resources on these lands are some of the nation’s greatest assets and have major economic, environmental, and social significance for all Americans. Forest Service’s HR mission takes on unique challenges in the Federal ecosystem, as its Talent needs must respond to unpredictable fire emergencies over vast and remote areas and require highly qualified and specific skills. This presents a yearly challenge for the HRES mission to identify, onboard and deploy needed resources across the country quickly and effectively, and handle complex challenges that result from the dangerous work (e.g. Worker’s Comp, Leave Policies, etc.). 

Forest Services’ Project Management Office (PMO), which provides oversight and maintains the standards of all projects executed within HRES, called on Longevity for support. Our HR Transformation experts got to work identifying and eliminating the issues that were causing delays in the employee lifecycle and experience.  

Our partnership began in 2017 to support a wide range of services to help Forest Service operate its HRIT systems and modernize systems, infrastructure and business process and policies. This includes dedicated IT service support, program management and project support for the agency’s 60,000 employees and related stakeholders.  Since then, we have supported leadership in implementing HR Information Systems (HRIS) applications within the Human Capital Management (HRM) enterprise, enabled decision making and prioritization of initiatives utilizing data informed analysis, developed risk management best practices to identify, manage and mitigate risks to minimize impacts and provided technical subject matter expertise during the planning and performance of technical phases. Our project dashboards, templates and playbooks have improved efficiency and enhanced current operating procedures and guidelines.    

Longevity has established more than a dozen project roadmaps, plans and schedules for the implementation of various new IT solutions. We have also trained FS leaders to support change management by providing the tools and guidance needed to support and implement changes organization-wide. We continue to provide the oversight that helps HRES maintain the highest standards with innovative  strategies and tools.   

• 1,000+ eOPFs reviewed and audited 
• 465+ project artifacts produced
• 32 process-improvement projects supported
  
• 19 new projects initiated since 2017