Success Story: Building a Program Management Foundation for a First-Year Federal Immunization Program

The Client

A local public health agency administers a childhood immunization program through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccines for Children (VFC) Cooperative Agreement. As one of the first new city jurisdictions in approximately a decade to receive direct federal funding under the program, the organization was preparing to manage its first full federal budget period as a direct CDC recipient.

The Challenge

The client entered its first year as a direct CDC award recipient without the planning period or operational infrastructure that established jurisdictions had developed over many years. Although the organization assumed full responsibility for federal program requirements immediately, it lacked an integrated annual plan, along with the performance measurement and governance structure needed to manage those responsibilities effectively.

With a fixed federal grant calendar, defined performance expectations and limited time before the fiscal year began, leadership needed a structured approach to manage program execution and track performance throughout the year. Without an integrated management framework, the client risked falling behind on required activities and lacking timely insight into its performance during a critical first year as a federal funding recipient.

The organization engaged Weaver to help establish sustainable planning, performance measurement and governance foundation to support long-term program success.

The Process

Weaver organized the engagement around four phases: initiate, assess, build and finalize, while adapting the delivery approach to meet the compressed implementation schedule. Rather than completing each phase sequentially, the team conducted discovery, solution design and document development concurrently, allowing findings from stakeholder interviews to inform deliverables as they were developed.

• Initiate and assess: Weaver conducted structured interviews with program leadership, operational staff, technical partners and state stakeholders to understand the client’s operating model, source systems and reporting responsibilities and challenge assumptions about its operations and data access. Our team also reviewed existing documentation and workflows.
• Build: Findings from discovery informed an integrated planning, performance measurement and governance framework, with deliverables developed and validated concurrently. Weaver also identified opportunities to improve reporting visibility, clarify milestone ownership and better leverage existing data resources.
• Finalize: We incorporated client feedback to refine the deliverables, ensuring they reflected the organization’s operating environment and provided a practical foundation for first-year execution.

This collaborative, iterative approach enabled the client to establish a connected planning, performance measurement and governance framework tailored to the unique demands of its first year as a CDC-funded jurisdiction.

The Deliverables

Weaver delivered an integrated set of planning, measurement and governance tools designed to help the organization execute its federal program requirements. The engagement included an integrated annual program plan and timeline supported by a single milestone master, creating one source of truth for program planning, performance reporting and key performance indicator (KPI) management. The team also developed a KPI framework with 38 performance indicators across eight operational domains, introducing leading indicators that enabled leadership to identify pacing issues before they affected program outcomes.

Additional deliverables included a weekly metrics reporting template, activity-level work plans, governance documentation and a standard operating procedure playbook that translated federal requirements into actionable responsibilities while improving data management and operational consistency.

Together, these tools gave the client a connected program-management foundation, clearer accountability, earlier visibility into performance and documented processes to support consistent execution throughout its first federal budget period.

Authored by Cale Coyle and Anna Stevens

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