Streamlining Defense Funding Requests

The Challenge

A Department of Defense agency responsible for distributing critical financial resources to support national security and foreign policy initiatives was drowning in operational chaos. Their entire funding request process—from submission to approval—ran through email.

This resulted in anxiety, frustration, duplicated efforts, frequent data loss, and insufficient accountability. Poor coordination rippled across the security cooperation and security assistance agencies. As one stakeholder put it: "The center of the funnel is starting to break."

The Solution

Working with finance and policy personnel from 14 DoD agencies, our team used Agile and Human-Centered Design practices to investigate coordination issues, validate user needs, and rapidly iterate toward a solution. While the organization originally requested a simple drop box for funding requests, our research uncovered that the coordination issues were systemic and that a broader, more ambitious solution was required.

Through further product discovery and stakeholder collaboration, we developed a comprehensive workflow model to centralize and manage the entire request lifecycle—from creation to approval.

We delivered a customized tool that enables users to:

• Create and submit funding requests with standardized templates
• Coordinate and route requests through proper channels
• Review, adjudicate, and track request status in real-time
• Search historical requests and maintain centralized data
• Configure custom workflows for different request types

The tool brought structure, transparency, and accountability to a process that had operated in the dark for years.

The Impact

Within one year of launch, the platform was adopted by more than 20 DoD agencies, marking the first successful digitalization of a process at this scale for the client.

The new system now:

• Improves request quality through standardization and built-in guidance
• Centralizes data and eliminates information silos
• Enhances accessibility across the DoD community
• Increases accountability and adherence to established protocols
• Reduces coordination time and eliminates duplicate efforts

What started as a broken process became a model for how critical government processes can be modernized through thoughtful design and user-centered practices. Deeply satisfied with the work delivered, this DoD organization partnered with our team again to expand the scope and functionality of the tool for even greater impact.