Organizational Redesign of the Social Welfare Board (JPS)

At CICAP, I took over two large-scale consulting engagements with Costa Rica’s Junta de Protección Social (JPS) that had fallen more than a year behind schedule: “Support and Implementation of the First Phase of the IT Strategic Plan, per Guidelines Issued by the Comptroller General’s Office” and “Strengthening the Management of the Human Talent Development Department,” together spanning technology, organizational structure and functions, and human resources. Institutional trust had eroded and deliverables were disputed, with one going through multiple versions without sign-off.

I rebuilt relationships with senior JPS leadership, engaged internal champions in the Planning Division, and facilitated structured negotiation to resolve the contractual impasse, renegotiating scope and timelines to cut accumulated delays by over 50%. I led a team of around six consultants across both engagements to bring them to completion.

Together, the two engagements delivered a new organizational structure, job and succession manuals, and IT security and continuity studies, rescuing a multi-million-colón commitment that had been at serious risk of collapse.

This experience sharpened a set of skills I still rely on: rescuing at-risk projects through structured stakeholder negotiation, rebuilding trust with a skeptical institutional counterpart, renegotiating scope and contracts under pressure, and leading a multidisciplinary consultant team to deliver across technology, organizational design, and human-resources workstreams at once.