PCG’s quarterly employee recognition program, aptly-named the EPIC Awards, is designed to help bring the firm’s four core tenets—Entrepreneurial Spirit, Passion, Impact, and Community—to life in a tangible way. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Caitlin Chaloux, Supervisor of Business Analytics within our Education practice, has been selected as PCG’s newest EPIC Awards winner in recognition of the Impact she has had on colleagues, clients, and systems while delivering solutions that matter to those we serve.

Caitlin was nominated by Jim McGlynn, a manager on the Education team, for her leadership in streamlining the use of tools and processes to develop high impact education technologies, developing strong technical business analysts across the firm’s education practice, and beginning to work with PCG’s Human Capital Management (HCM) team to develop clearer career pathways in the critical area of technical business analytics. Technical business analysts align information technology systems with business operations by analyzing and developing innovative integrated software solutions. For example, within the Education practice, they help gather information from school district administrators, teachers, and other subject matter experts, and transform that information into designs and requirements that software developers use to develop technologies to improve outcomes for students and make school operations more effective.

As the national leader in special education case management and consulting services, PCG’s education technologies support the learning and development of one out of every five public school students with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in the country. In her role as Supervisor of Business Analytics, Caitlin’s work has strengthened PCG’s ability to support special education operations, instruction, and monitor progress of students, especially as they recover from the pandemic. Please read on to learn more about Caitlin’s impact on clients, the firm, and the millions of students they collectively serve.

Bringing a Fresh Perspective to PCG

In 2017, after nearly four years serving education clients, Caitlin left PCG to pursue an opportunity with an industry leading digital customer experience agency known for its expertise in technology, data, and design. For the next year, Caitlin honed skills she would use to support PCG’s increasing focus on the critical capability of business analytics in effective software design and development. Caitlin returned to PCG in 2018 and since then, has leveraged her prior experience and training to:

• Help build out a core of skilled technical business analysts, and
• Streamline the use of new tools to improve specification writing, test case scenario creation, and design conversations with clients and our development peers.

She has applied her experience and leadership on a handful of recent high profile projects in one of the firm’s core business lines, serving our most vulnerable student populations. To drive this work, Caitlin has helped to implement a more modern, updated toolset to support the design of PCG’s web-based technologies, teaching others within the practice area how to apply these tools and techniques to envision and design compelling user experiences.

Among key recent projects, Caitlin led aspects of the software development life cycle (SDLC) for several statewide and national initiatives for PCG’s education practice, including: Connecticut’s statewide Special Education System and Parent Portal, New Jersey’s statewide upgrade to the newest version of EDPlan, as well as a coordinated national upgrade that modernized special education planning and delivery for clients in Utah, Vermont, and the Virgin Islands.

Impacting Others

One of Caitlin's primary responsibilities is to groom, cultivate, and build the capacity of colleagues in areas such as requirements gathering, documentation, design, and other critical steps in developing quality software. In this regard, Caitlin has been assigned a team of talented staff members to train, orient, and develop, in coordination with regional teams, national service lines, and PCG’s HCM department. It is expected that this type of modeling and coaching will only scale over time as PCG focuses more on this critical capability as the firm continues to grow to support more and more state education agencies and school districts.

Commenting on Caitlin’s contributions, Jim McGlynn said, “Her coaching and investments in others have helped to ensure clear expectations are being set with clients related to scope and deliverables, and results in high quality development with minimal software defects. Caitlin is a leader who knows how to train others in this critical area of our work, thereby amplifying her impact on millions of children and families supported by PCG’s work. She embodies the ‘Impact’ of the EPIC Awards.”

To better recruit, orient, and develop technical business analysts as the firm grows, Caitlin has been working with PCG’s corporate HCM team to better define career pathways, role descriptions, and professional learning so that talented analysts who want to make a meaningful difference in the lives of children and families can build a lifelong career at PCG.

Impacting Business

Caitlin's work has resulted in low defect rates across a number of large scale, high-impact projects, reducing costs to clients and the firm; created efficiencies in post-implementation system support and maintenance, making it easy for system users to perform their work in service of special education students; and has streamlined processes so that clients who are hoping to modernize other data systems can add-on new EDPlan features with relative ease.

Effective software development requires strong collaboration and partnership between the business and development teams responsible for solutions delivery. In this regard, Caitlin’s impact can also be felt, as Arathi Prasad, development director, stated:

“Caitlin is well-liked and highly respected by all developers and development managers. She does an excellent job collaborating with the development team to provide creative and long-term solutions for our customers. Her extensive knowledge has contributed to the increase of the quality and in turn cost effectiveness of our products. Her confidence and enthusiasm make her a pleasure to work with and an excellent team member on any special project. Through her influence, the collaboration between client, business analyst, and developers has increased, and time to market has decreased.”

Caitlin is a star performer, an emerging leader, and a highly-qualified professional who is not only doing quality work directly, but making it a point to invest in others, develop their skills, and expand her overall impact on millions of students.

Please join us in congratulating Caitlin for this well-deserved recognition of her commitment to helping PCG deliver solutions that matter to our clients and those they serve. It is because of colleagues like Caitlin that PCG continues to make an impact in the communities where we live and work.