Sharing our knowledge with clients so they succeed

About Us

Our team of consultants has a broad array of competencies available to offer our clients to directly meet their needs.

René Ewing

René brings over 25 years consulting experience in performance measurement, management systems, benchmarking, executive management coaching, strategic planning and evaluation. In the early 1980’s she helped design and implement an organization wide performance scorecard and management system for Xerox. As the Special Assistant for Management Improvement for Governor Locke, she worked directly with Bob Kaplan of Harvard to design a balance scorecard to be used by state agencies to measure the success of their organizations to deliver their mission.

She also has a vast experience in the use of Benchmarking. René has taught Benchmarking classes at Bellevue Community College . She also has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and conducted workshops on the use of benchmarking. When she was the Western Region Quality Manager at Xerox she was a colleague of and worked with Bob Camp the “father of Benchmarking” and author of the book "Benchmarking, the search for industry best practices that lead to superior performance". She was a member of the Xerox Benchmarking Network.

As the Xerox Western Region Quality Manager she facilitated multiple benchmarking efforts with different business units throughout the organization on sales processes, lead development, and service delivery to name a few examples. Each project had measurable improvements in the delivery systems and captured new innovative ways of doing business which resulted in streamlining the operation, saving time or money. She has worked with numerous clients to help them design benchmarking projects.

As a consultant René has worked with public agencies in Washington, California, Oregon and Texas. She has assisted her clients in adapting the learnings from the corporate business environment to the public sector. She has facilitated literally hundreds of executive teams through strategic planning sessions to develop meaningful goals, performance measures and management processes to monitor and track their progress toward their goals.

René was the founding President of the Washington State Quality Award (WSQA) Board of Directors. She is a trained Baldrige and WSQA examiner. She and Dick Zimmerman have designed and are delivering the current curriculum being offered by WSQA to organizations throughout the state. Her thorough knowledge of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provides the basis for her consulting philosophy and management practices.

 Cindy Colvin

Cindy Colvin has extensive experience in organizational performance management systems. From October 1997 to December 2000, she served as the Executive Director of Organizational Development for Washington Department of Transportation. In that capacity, she acted as the change agent responsible for introducing organizational performance management measures and systems to the department, implementing strategic and operational planning, and evaluating internal efforts.

She left the agency in 2000 to pursue the development of a statewide, nationally accredited professional credentialing program for managers, the Washington Certified Public Manager program. She brings in depth knowledge of the agency’s systems and business operations based on this experience.

She has worked with both private sector and public sector entities to bring performance management systems on line, including evaluating the cost of such systems and the evaluation of their effectiveness. She works with clients to develop management processes that ensure the investment in data collection efforts yield a high rate of return in better management decisions. Recent Washington state performance measurement clients include the Department of Social and Health Services, Department of Personnel, Department of General Administration, Human Rights Commission, Secretary of State, Office of Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprises, and City of Olympia.

In addition, she was recently selected by Washington Department of Personnel as the consultant to teach managers statewide how to analyze the cost of government services as the first step in readiness for competitive contracting. She is currently providing training around the state on this topic.

Cindy brings a wealth of experience in strategic planning and balanced scorecard development. She has over fifteen years’ experience in Washington state government. She specializes in strategic planning, leadership development, and performance measures. She has provided consulting services to agency directors and secretaries as both an internal and external consultant. She was trained in the balanced scorecard by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative and has worked with executives to develop and cascade the scorecard within the public sector for the last four years.

She has a master’s degree in organizational systems design and has applied that knowledge to helping clients design and implement meaningful performance measurement systems across a broad array of public sector agencies. Using a systemic change model, she coaches leaders in facilitating sustainable change in complex, adaptive organizational systems. She has developed and delivered over a hundred workshops and training programs to a variety of audiences on a broad array of topics.

Christie O’Loughlin

Christie O'Loughlin has been a performance auditor since 1979. She performed both internal and external performance audits for the DSHS Audit Division as an auditor and audit manager for 15 years. As audit manager she oversaw several teams (consisting of performance auditors, management consultants, and fiscal auditors) auditing programs funded through 39 counties, and all programs funded under the Divisions of Developmental Disabilities, Mental Health, Alcohol and Substance Abuse, and Vocational Rehabilitation. The budgeted programs she audited were funded at over $800 million at that time. She then went to the Department of Agriculture where she was the agency’s internal auditor, the internal quality consultant, and Executive Policy Assistant to the Director for 6 years.

For five years, as policy assistant to the Director of the Department of Agriculture (WSDA), she facilitated WSDA’s implementation of a strategic planning process. She trained and facilitated more than 32 program teams in writing annual business plans, and measured their progress towards accomplishment of their annual performance/outcome measures. Later other Baldrige elements were added to the process.

Christie will bring her more than 25 years experience as an internal auditor to this project. Her wealth of experience in working with organizations to insure not only compliance with audit requirements but evaluation of effectiveness of the systems is well matched to this evaluation. She currently serves as the President of the Institute of Internal Auditors, Nisqually Chapter.

Richard (Dick) Zimmerman

Dick has a wealth of experience in the private sector as a former Information Technology professional and senior executive. Dick spent 15 years in information technology, managing large systems projects and division-wide information technology professional teams. He was a member of the core team that started a new business division in Weyerhaeuser’s wood products and managed operational units in that division. In Weyerhaeuser’s real estate business, Dick led the implementation of TQM in all of their 11 subsidiaries.

With a leave of absence from Weyerhaeuser, Dick worked as the Executive Director of the Washington Performance Partnership under Governor Lowry, he led the development of a management model (based on Baldrige), facilitated the education of over 100 internal quality consultants from state agencies and supported implementation of these management practices.

Returning to Weyerhaeuser, as the Director of Organization Effectiveness, he led a team of business management and change management internal consultants that worked with senior level management teams across Weyerhaeuser. He worked with management teams in major mills; leading change efforts, facilitating strategic planning, providing education workshops on various management topics.

Dick has served as an Examiner with the Washington State Quality Award (WSQA) which is modeled after the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Dick and René have designed and are delivering the current curriculum being offered by WSQA to organizations throughout the state. This training assists organizations in the implementation of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Criteria, to use the criteria as an assessment tool and to guide them in applying for the state and national awards.